


A Perfect Storm

by grilledcheesing



Category: Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: GUESS WHO IS BACK so help me god, I know this isn't what I usually write but give it a chance, and iron!dad, and just like a lot of feelings, enemies to friends to lovers trope because i want to have my cake and cry in it too, i shouldn't be here but lol @ real life, i swear it also gets cute at some point when it's not like full of despair, obviously there is angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2019-06-22 00:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 44,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15570162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grilledcheesing/pseuds/grilledcheesing
Summary: The events of Infinity War expose Spider-Man, so Peter has to disappear — so effectively that even Tony doesn’t have a prayer of finding him. So effectively that nobody on the team knows when May Parker dies, leaving Peter to live on the streets.Two years later, with a new civilian identity, a new alias, and an entire life buried in his wake, the last person Peter's expecting to compromise his secret is one Johnny Storm.





	1. Chapter 1

Peter doesn’t remember waking up after the snap. What he does remember is waking up on the Guardians’ ship, with Mantis’s wide eyes staring unblinkingly into his, and knowing all at once that he came back the wrong way. 

 

It’s like that uneasy feeling of stepping onto the subway and thinking,  _ I forgot something _ . Like he didn't flick off the A/C unit, or left his graphing calculator on his desk. Only the feeling is magnified a hundred fold, tightening in his chest, cold and coiled and unrelenting. 

 

“The boy of spiders is awake.” 

 

“And it’s not screaming this time,” remarks the biggest one. 

 

Peter blinks into their expectant gazes. His voice is hoarse when he speaks, gritty and painful in his throat. “Where’s Mr. Stark?” 

 

Nobody will look at him for a moment — a brief, crushing moment when the world seems to cave in on itself. Peter still doesn’t know what happened, but he understands enough to know this: if Mr. Stark is dead, it’s his fault. He wasn’t there to help. Wasn’t there to watch his back, the way he’s watched Peter’s too many times to count. 

 

It’s Quill who eventually steps forward, and lets out the world’s weariest sigh. “He has us orbiting Mars while we waited on you to wake up.” 

 

The relief is so crippling that Peter doesn’t even think to ask any other questions. Quill answers them anyway. 

 

“I don’t know what all goes on down there now — sounds super effed up, if you ask me — but the dude says your identity has been compromised. Some baddies want to arrest you for like, ‘unlawful vigilantism,’ or something.” Quill uses air quotes and rolls his eyes, but there is a grimness in his expression that says what Quill won’t speak out loud: Peter is screwed. 

 

But Peter nods, because that’s all he can do. Nods, because it’s a problem, but not a  _ problem _ , right? Mr. Stark will fix it. He always has. 

 

He doesn’t ask how it happened. He doesn’t want to waste anymore time. The sooner he can get back down to Earth — to his aunt, to his friends, to where Mr. Stark undoubtedly could use another set of hands — the better. 

 

“What am I supposed to do?” 

 

* * *

 

The solution offers more questions than it does answers. Mostly because Mr. Stark isn’t there to offer any of them. 

 

No, that’s not fair — he’s more than there. He sets Peter up with his new identity, gets him into a new school, even manages to keep him and his aunt in the city so they don’t have to uproot themselves. He makes Peter a wristwatch that obscures his face to passing technology enough that it won’t get picked up by security cameras, but not so much that it will raise suspicion. He tracks the cell phones of everyone in Peter’s old life so Peter can make sure to never cross paths with them. He orchestrates an extremely elaborate scene to make it look as though Spider-Man has died in action, killed in a blaze in an abandoned, condemned apartment building. 

 

He buries Peter Parker. Figuratively, and then literally. There’s a funeral in Queens, and ashes scattered in the East River. Just like that, sixteen years erased, with a few sad words and a gust of wind. 

 

* * *

 

 

There is one rule that all the other new rules hinge on: Peter can’t fight crime anymore. Not as  _ Andrew Summers _ , or any other iteration of himself. 

 

“So what am I supposed to do if — if there’s another Thanos? Or someone’s just in front of me, and needs my help?” 

 

It isn’t Tony’s voice that responds. Peter isn’t even allowed to  _ see _ Tony. With Ross as hot as he is on Peter’s trail, they can’t afford to leave a single moment to chance. 

 

“I’m sorry, kid,” says Happy on the other end of the line. For once, he really seems to mean it. But it doesn’t make him sugar coat the brutal truth: “It’s that or the Raft.” 

 

Peter knows all about the Raft. He knows because Wanda told him. He knows because even though everyone else seems to have forgotten what happened in the Beyond, he remembers every awful, excruciating second — the rip of the cells in his body before it claimed him, the persistent  _ incompleteness _ of him, the way he stumbled into the other taken souls and absorbed their hurt as if it was their own. 

 

Sometimes it feels like that is all Peter is still doing — cells multiplying, splitting, ripping, and piecing themselves back together again. Every time they take a new shape, they have absorbed something else: Mr. Stark’s worry, May’s fear, his friends’ grief, the constant roar of the chaos of a planet that doesn’t know how to resolve itself in Thanos’s aftermath. He is part of everyone and everything except, it seems, himself. 

 

It makes it harder to live, but that much easier to let Peter Parker die.

 

* * *

 

 

Three months into his new life, and Peter has made every effort he can to seem okay. He learns to swallow the gasps from his nightmares. Forces himself to join new clubs, and interact with other kids. Goes to school on time and leaves on time and steels his heart to anything in between, hardening it from any kind of real friendship, any kind of real connection, anything that might let someone close enough to him that he’ll have to absorb their hurt, too. 

 

Peter has hurt enough people in this lifetime to even imagine hurting one more. 

 

Because May is pretending, too. Only she doesn’t remember sometimes that Peter can hear her — not tears, but the long, heavy sighs. The way the songs she hums to herself are sadder and slower than the ones she hummed before. The way she murmurs in her sleep some nights, saying the names of old patients, old coworkers, and, of course, Ben — the never ending list of people she has cared about that Peter has robbed from her. 

 

Peter doesn’t sleep at all. He lays awake at night, paralyzed. Watching the red dots on the map of Ned and MJ and his other friends in Queens settle into their apartments, so close and so far out of his reach. Listening to crimes he can’t prevent and aching for people he can’t help. The dark hours are consumed with distant sirens that wail in his ears, flashes of headlights that cut through his new bedroom in Brooklyn, the guilt so tight in his chest that he cannot decide which hell is worse: the one that he endured in the Beyond, or this one that he has to endure now that he’s back. 

 

But he promised Mr. Stark. He promised his aunt. And he will play dead for as long as he has to, if it means keeping them safe. 

 

* * *

 

Before Peter’s life goes to shit, everyone else’s does.

 

Avengers and vigilantes alike are disappearing. Nobody is in touch with Peter — nobody knows  _ how _ to be in touch with Peter — so he doesn’t know the circumstances, only knows that it’s bad. Worse still, because without their protection, crime is more rampant than ever. And every day Peter is itching in his new school at his new desk with these new friends to  _ do something _ , feeling like a caged animal, desperate for some kind of release. 

 

What he gets instead is this: a Tuesday afternoon, with his backpack slung over his shoulder and one of Ned’s old Spotify playlists blasting in his ears, turning the key in the lock. He’s incensed — bordering furious. But he won’t let himself feel it fully,  _ can’t _ let himself, so the most he can hope for is that May will feel it for him. 

 

Crushed in his hand in a rolled up newspaper, with a headline screaming:  _ Introducing New York’s Latest Heroes, The Fantastic Four.  _

 

The article is a joke. A sycophantic, ridiculous, pandering  _ joke _ . The profiles on all four of the members read like PR pitches. Ross’s fingerprints are all over it. A make-good, after taking all the heroes that  _ mattered _ away. Now that Ross has puppets — shiny, NASA-trained, uniformed puppets, who have worked for the government their entire careers and have never even seen the inside of an actual fight — the public has something to believe in again. Only this time, that belief is something Ross can control. 

 

That alone is enough to upset Peter. But the inclusion of one  _ Johnny Storm _ — whose eighteenth birthday was conveniently just a week before the article went to print — is enough to send him hurtling over an edge he’s been trying to turn his back on for months. 

 

But then the lock clicks, and so does something else. Something quiet. Something final. And somehow Peter knows before he even opens the door. 

 

He finds May still sitting on the couch, her patient files fanned on her lap and on the floor, as if she merely paused in picking them back up again. She’s wearing one of her favorite tops, a faded striped button-up tank he’s seen her in a hundred times: twirling in the kitchen with Ben, shouting at a cab driver, slurping too loudly at a ramen restaurant. Always in motion. Always poised on the edge of a smile. 

 

Peter doesn’t go to her. He just stands there, the backpack sliding to the floor, the music overpowered by the screaming in his ears. 

 

“No.” It’s all he can say. All he can manage. “No, no, no, no no no no no no …” 

 

He finds out later that it was a brain aneurysm. Nothing to be done. But at that moment, there is no later — there is only this moment now, and the sense that he is reaching, reaching,  _ reaching _ — for eight hours ago, when May blew him a goodbye kiss at the door. For a year ago, when he was sailing over rooftops, keeping his borough’s peace. For a lifetime ago, when he never imagined a world that could give him so much and then so brutally, effortlessly take it all away. 

 

He leaves her there. Runs. Back to Queens, heedless of the wristwatch and its warnings; heedless of strangers staring at him; heedless of his own humanity. He runs, and runs, and runs, until he’s back at his old apartment building, only to discover it’s since been torn down and replaced. 

 

He stumbles into an alley. Down to his knees. Pulls out his phone and calls the only number he’s ever known by heart. 

 

It's disconnected. But Peter calls, and calls, and calls, tears streaming down his face, because if anyone will know what to do, it’s Mr. Stark. 

 

Eventually some combination of grief and an exhaustion that has weighed on him for months seeps in. Peter doesn't realize he's falling asleep until he wakes with a start. It’s the first of many nights he’ll spend out on the streets, but the one he will wake up with the most clarity: he can’t contact Mr. Stark. He can’t involve him. If Mr. Stark tries to help, and they find out Peter Parker isn’t dead, he might just as easily end up on the Raft with everyone else. 

 

Peter pulls the phone out of his pocket and crushes it with his fist. 

 

And then, oddly, there is relief: the worst thing has happened. He doesn’t have anything to fear anymore, never has to wait for another shoe to drop. There is nobody he can hurt now except for himself. 

 

* * *

 

A month passes. Peter lives on the streets; it’s easy. Thoughtless, even. He doesn’t need much — barely sleeps, barely eats. When he has to, he hovers on the edges of Prospect Park, watching for people as they throw away their picnic leftovers and snatching it from the tops of garbage cans. He sleeps in the park, or in alleys behind dumpsters. He reads in the back corners of libraries.  

 

But most of the time, he patrols. 

 

Only now he’s quiet about it. No bright colors, no flashy webs. No snarky remarks or posing for selfies. He wears black and moves too fast for anyone to even notice what he’s wearing at all; he keeps his patrols so scattered across boroughs that nobody even thinks the interference in crimes are connected to one person at all. 

 

Sometimes it’s simple stuff. Apartment fires. Robberies. Other times it’s bigger — gas line explosions. Gang activity. Alien tech. 

 

More often than not, though, it’s cleaning up after this “Fantastic Four”. 

 

They’re sloppy. Green. Peter knows he doesn’t have much of a right to judge at sixteen, but the fact that they call themselves a  _ team _ is laughable; he can hear their comms, and not of them will listen to a word the others say. They’re too busy trying to one-up each other, or convinced that their own plan is the best. They're bullheaded, disorganized, and sometimes seem completely ignorant to how many lives are at stake every time they let themselves fall apart. 

 

Johnny Storm, in particular, is the worst. 

 

Peter aches for the days of the Avengers; for the days when he knew that his heroes would protect him. Days that he didn’t have to worry, the way he has to now — pulling civilians out of the fray, stopping buildings from collapsing, putting out  _literal fires_ that the Human Torch has ignited in his wake. 

 

But even those good old days were fiction. The Avengers were no better, in the end. It just so happens that now, this fractured, inexperienced “Fantastic Four” is all New York has got. 

 

They don’t even notice Peter picking up their pieces; Peter has made well sure of that. He’s not as strong as he used to be — even he’s embarrassed by how scrawny he is now — but he’s fast. In, out, gone before anyone’s the wiser. 

 

That is, until Johnny Storm’s idiocy almost is his end. 

 

He’s showing off again, preening for the public the way he always does, despite the fact that there are straight up doom bots roaming around the city and threatening to zap them all into oblivion. 

 

“Flame on!” Johnny yells — Peter just barely stops himself from gagging, but the teenagers below start shrieking and pointing, and more importantly, not leaving the ridiculously dangerous sidelines. 

 

Enter Peter — he diverts the doom bots, hacking into one of them and sending a signal to all of its fellow bots that short circuits them all on the spot. One minute they’re in the air and the next they’re all toppling to the ground, hunks of useless, alien metal. The crowds cheer below, screaming for the Human Torch, who does a little bow in midair and then shoots himself up into the air like a pyrotechnic Sky Dancer, his smirk almost too smug for his face. 

 

Peter does something he never does, then, and lingers for just a moment from the periphery. It’s an unwelcome and brutal thought that stalls him: Mr. Stark would be proud. 

 

He ducks back into the labyrinth of rooftops then, jumping and weaving and avoiding anything that might shed a light or cast his shadow. He has every intention of finding a spot in Central Park to keep himself for the few hours left before dawn when all at once, he is so compelled to stop that it’s as if someone hit the brakes on his brain. He is used to the unsettling sense he’s developed over time, but entirely unused to urgency like this. 

 

He follows it back a few rooftops, just in time to see one errant doom bot in a different, slightly larger shape. It seems as if they did have a leader after all, and Peter failed to take it out with the others. More relevantly — it now has its focus on one entirely unsuspecting Johnny Storm. 

 

 

Who appears, at the moment, to be extremely engaged ... in taking a selfie in midair. 

 

There's no time to shout out a warning; the doom bot is powering up. Peter hurls himself at the side of it, drop-kicking it into a dumpster, reeling backwards when the explosion lights up the alley and sends him hurtling straight into a brick wall. 

 

He gasps and coughs the smoke out of his lungs, just barely remembering himself before he reaches up to pull off his mask. 

 

“Shit.  _ Shit _ .”

 

Peter stumbles to his feet, or at least he tries to — Johnny gets to him first, his hands wrapping around Peter's forearms, pulling him upright. 

 

“Are you okay?” 

 

Johnny’s hands are on him still, now bracing his shoulders. Peter’s vision swims for a moment, and then he is blinking up into Johnny Storm’s face. 

 

His eyes — they’re not what Peter is expecting. There’s a warmth in them, something compelling enough that for a moment, Peter forgets himself so entirely that he breaks a second one of his rules that night: he speaks.

 

“I’m fine.” 

 

Johnny blows out a breath of relief, looking between the steaming doom bot’s wreckage and then back at Peter. “You saved my freaking life.” 

 

Peter shrugs, and shrugs off Johnny’s hands right along with it. He starts to walk away, only because his ears are ringing and he needs to assess his own damage before he actually takes off. It seems, though, that aside from being exceptionally rattled, he's fine. 

 

Johnny jogs forward to keep up with him. No, worse — jogs ahead and then stands directly in front of Peter, cutting him off. “Do you … who are you?” Johnny asks, taking another step back and raking his eyes up and down Peter’s form. 

 

Peter’s face is burning. Johnny isn’t actually seeing at him — his face is still obscured by a mask — but it’s been so long that anyone has looked at him at all that there is something staggering about it, something that knocks the air around him and makes him unsteady. 

 

“I’m not — I’m not anyone.” 

 

Johnny cocks his head to the side, looking Peter up and down with clear amusement. It's a smirk Peter has seen a hundred times over, on laundromat television screens and people's phones on the subway — but only now that he's this close to it does Peter get it. Whatever it is that draws people in. There is something infectious, almost conspiratorial about that smirk. It sets Peter at a slippery kind of ease. Like maybe he's known Johnny before, or could. Like maybe he could trust him, even though Peter isn't in the business of trusting anyone. 

 

“What, like some kind of ghost?” Johnny asks. 

 

Peter feels the tug of his upper lip. He shouldn't say a word. He's already said too much. 

 

But there is something about that goddamn smirk. 

 

“Sure.” 

 

He flings himself into an alley then, landing on his feet and letting the night swallow him. Johnny yells down for him to wait and even tries to follow, but he doesn’t stand a chance. Still, in the few seconds he’s on Peter’s trail, there is this strange and unfamiliar quickening of his heart, beating past his ribs and up into his throat — some ridiculous, nonsensical urge to stop that fades as soon as it comes. 

 

And thank god for that. Because if there were, even for a fleeting moment, a chance that Peter might change his mind about Johnny Storm, it dies a quick death the very next day. Peter is walking past a bus stop in Hell’s Kitchen when he sees the kid reloading the newspaper stands for the morning, the front page headline screaming like some kind of cosmic joke. 

 

_ Human Torch Claims Existence Of Unknown Vigilante Called ‘Ghost’. _

 

Peter closes his eyes, but the calming breath never comes. Instead his fingers curl into fists, his blood rushes in his ears, and every single part of him tenses, already anticipating the fallout from this like an inevitable blow.  

 

Peter doesn’t know who will catch him, or how, or when, but of one thing there is absolutely no doubt: the next time he sees the Human Torch, he’s going to  _ kill _ him. 


	2. Chapter 2

“You planning on bleeding to death, or …”

 

Peter opens his eyes to a face he has never seen in person before, but would know anywhere: Black Widow. He stares up at her, trying to blink away his concussion — a feat he must not be entirely successful at, given the sharpness of her frown.

 

“I’m … “

 

“Ghost?”

 

He groans. She offers him a hand to help him up, a wry smile on her face. Peter takes it.

 

It’s been two months since Johnny Storm essentially outed him, and since then Peter has been chased and shot at on a daily basis, nearly drowned on about a weekly one, and accidentally set on fire by Johnny Storm’s ill-fated attempts to help out more times than he can count.

 

“Thanks for, uh … waking me,” says Peter.

 

She ignores him, grabbing him by the shoulders and sitting him down on a crate by the dumpster he’d unceremoniously passed out behind.

 

It occurs to him that he should shake her off and run — this isn’t just dangerous for his own sake, but for hers — but the last hit really took a lot out of him. More alien tech out on the streets, and Mr. Fantastic was in over his head. Peter only just barely managed to stop civilians from getting caught in the crossfire before getting grazed by one of the blasts himself.

 

Which was all well and good, until one Johnny Storm blazed past and somehow Peter lost his footing, miscalculated the distance of the ledge in front of him, and ended up with the grade A concussion he’s recovering from now.

 

She doesn’t ask him any questions, so Peter knows that she _knows_ . About the person he was, and not just the shadow he is now. The few minutes of silence seem to carve something out of him, an ache that he thought he’d left behind a long time ago. He wants something human, something real — wants to talk to her as _Peter_ , wants her to ground him in some way, offer a tether back to the life he left and the world he used to know.

 

Just when he thinks it might break him, she levels him with a look so plain and unmistakable that it nearly takes the air out of his lungs.

 

“What should I tell him?”

 

Peter didn’t think he was capable of something so mundane as tears, but they rise up with unforgiving speed.

 

“Don’t.” Peter takes a breath through his nose, trying to calm the slamming of his heart. “If he knew I was doing this …”

 

Her lip quirks. “It’s not like it would surprise him.”

 

Peter’s throat is thick. “It would disappoint him.”

 

The edges of her face soften almost imperceptibly. He can trust her, he knows. She won’t tell his secret. He can’t tell if the crushing feeling in his chest is relief or something else.

 

She cocks her head for him to sit up, then wordlessly inspects the damage on his head.

 

“I heal fast,” he blurts.  

 

She lets out a sigh. “You’re a smart kid.”

 

“Sure.”

 

“What do you get when you multiply a number by zero?”

 

Peter knows better than to answer her, but he’s so desperate for some semblance of a normal conversation that he can’t help himself. “Zero.”

 

She narrows her eyes at him. “Same goes with ‘fast healing’ when you’re already dead.”

 

It’s the closest thing to _Stay safe_ as she’ll ever get, he knows. Trouble is, he doesn’t have much interest in that anymore. He can tell that she doesn’t, either. That maybe they are nothing more than two people with very little left to lose.

 

A siren starts blaring in the distance. She’s rolling her eyes at him before he even gets up.

 

“For his sake — don’t get yourself killed.”

 

They both are out of the alley long before Peter can make a promise he can’t keep.

 

* * *

 

At some point, the Fantastic Four become enough of an unmitigated disaster that Peter really has no choice but to move to Manhattan.

 

“Move” is a strong word. He essentially stops sleeping in Prospect Park and instead starts sleeping on one of the alcoves tucked away in the construction zone of the path along the East River, within a begrudging five-minute swinging distance from the Baxter Building. But “sleeping” is also a strong word — when he’s out, it’s never even long enough for him to dream.

 

He starts running into Natasha more often. Enough that she tells him to call her Natasha. At first he thinks it’s because he is frequenting Manhattan, but it doesn’t take him long to realize that it’s because she is running into him on purpose. He knows this is clearly a reflection of how pathetic he must seem now, but he’s too desperate for human interaction to care.

 

“How old are you, anyway?”

 

Peter snorts in response, offering her half of his Clif bar. He’s been finding them a lot lately — left on top of trash cans or benches. Some good Samaritan, or maybe a kid who doesn’t like what their mom packed them for lunch. It’s kind of an unspoken thing in New York to leave leftovers or unwanted food in plain sight for the homeless — something Peter used to do himself, when he had food to spare.

 

Natasha takes it, but splits it in half again, giving him back the rest.

 

“You should be in school.”

 

Peter shrugs.

 

“He thinks you’re in school.”

 

“He talked about me?”

 

She cocks her head at him. They both know Tony’s too smart for that.

 

“ _Andrew Summers_ , huh? Whose bright idea was that?”

 

Peter shrugs. Just hearing the name is its own kind of misery, like it has some undue power over him — like it’s a curse. It hurt his friends. It killed his aunt. It left him the person he is now, someone that Peter doesn’t recognize and certainly doesn’t like.

 

A silence settles over them then, in which Peter comes to understand that if she knows his fake name, she knows where he’s supposed to be right now — at a desk in a high school in Brooklyn, watching the clock for the bell to ring for lunch, manically checking college websites to see the fluctuating averages of GPAs and SAT scores for recent admissions the way all of his peers must be.

 

He knows it didn’t just all go back to normal for them. That he’s not the only one reeling in the aftermath of Thanos. But that kind of _normal_ is so far out of his depth right now that it seems less like another time and place, and more like a dream. 

 

“Someday we’ll all be out of this shit. And you’re going to wish you’d gone to school.”

 

Peter opens his mouth to say it — _I’ll probably be dead before then_ — but Natasha turns to him so sharply that it’s as though she heard it in his head before he voiced it out loud.

 

“Maybe,” he says instead. But even a word that small seems like it is putting a weight on his future that the universe simply can’t hold.

 

* * *

 

“You don’t like me much, do ya?”

 

Peter startles. He is never caught by surprise, but that sixth sense he has for danger has a ridiculously unhelpful way of going haywire when it comes to one Johnny Storm.

 

In any case, he doesn’t take the bait. Partially because the question is so dumb, but primarily because they are currently elbows deep in an extremely porous sea monster that just moseyed out of the Hudson and plopped itself on in the middle of FiDi.

 

“Aw, c’mon, Ghost. Throw me a bone.”

 

Peter flicks his wrist in an effort to get some of the monster’s goop off of himself. He is already itching at the seams with paranoia; it’s not quite dusk, but it’s daylight, and people may be able to see him from down below. He can practically sense the finance jocks whipping out the shiny new Stark Phone that was just released and using the insane camera function to zoom in on him.

 

“How about this — if you’re secretly in love with me, don’t say a word.”

 

Peter groans.

 

“Aha!” says Johnny, flying up slightly above him and aiming another flame at one of the monster’s many eyeballs. “I knew there was a human being somewhere inside your goth getup.”

 

“Do you maybe want to focus on the task at hand?” Peter mutters, just barely avoiding another one of the monster’s spits of acid.

 

“Ugh, don’t go all Reed on me.”

 

“ _Shit_.”

 

Peter manages to dodge in just enough time that the acid only grazes him, but does leave a sizable and sizzling hole in his black getup.

 

“Whoa — you okay?”

 

“Fine,” says Peter through his teeth.

 

And then, _finally_ , the rest of the “team” shows up. Peter takes the opportunity to scale off of the monster and do what he does best — start quietly pulling bystanders out of the line of fire, in and out of their way before anyone even sees his shadow. The Invisible Woman manages to finagle some kind of force field around the monster to stop the acid attacks, and Mr. Fantastic uses his body to strangle wherever it was getting its air supply from, and the Thing uses himself as a shield down below.

 

At one point, Peter has to duck and roll with a little kid and the closest thing he has to a barrier between them and the acid spit is the Thing himself.

 

“Oh, it’s you.”

 

Peter still has a shell-shocked kid dangling in his arms, so he doesn’t respond.

 

“You’re the one the kid has that big dumb crush on.”

 

Peter almost splutters right then and there, but the kid in his grip beats him to it: “Ew. _Cooties_.”

 

And then the monster is collapsing in on itself, and Peter has to begrudgingly admit that, for once, the Fantastic Four made quick work of the Monster of the Week.

 

He’s doing a quick scan of the street level to make sure nobody needs help before he slinks back over to the more touristy areas with trash cans loaded with uneaten food and calls it a night when Johnny Storm drops in from the sky and parks it next to him on the sidewalk.

 

“Dude … you should really look into getting a better uniform. Something a little more — I dunno. Acid-proof.”

 

Peter lets out a breath somewhere between a laugh and a wheeze. He crafted this out of clothes ripped up from Goodwill. Acid resistance is the last thing on his mind.

 

But Johnny is at least marginally more intuitive than he looks. He lowers his voice, saying, “You could try Tony — you know, Tony Stark?”

 

Peter is poised to hop up onto a ledge and run off the way he usually does after these little disasters, but the sound of Tony’s name snags something in his chest, holding him in place like he has accidentally latched onto bait on a hook.

 

Johnny’s smile broadens, encouraged by the rareness of Peter’s full attention. It’s kind of blinding. Peter blinks up into that smile just as a curious heat rises in his cheeks, making him wonder if the acid hit him further up than he thought.

 

“Like — this whole suit is Stark Tech. Well, part of it. Reed had input, but — ”

 

“Stark made you a suit?”

 

“Yeah,” says Johnny. “Sick, right? Heat resistant up to like, a bajillion degrees, or else all of New York would be seeing my junk.”

 

Peter’s heart is beating all over his body, an angry, irrational throb.  

 

“Gave me this tricked out Stark Band, too,” says Johnny, showing him his wrist. “So any of us can call him if we get in over our heads.”

 

“Call him?” Peter echoes dumbly.

 

Johnny nods. “Not that — I mean, we’ve got everything under control. We don’t need Stark to bail us out.”

 

Peter can’t move. “Right.”

 

“But I could call him for you. If you want.”  

 

“I’m rogue,” says Peter numbly. “I can’t call Tony Stark.”

 

And then, right on cue, sirens in the distance. Peter swivels to find a clean out, but there isn’t a place high enough for him to jump. If he could just use his _webs_ —

 

“Need a lift?”

 

Peter is turning away before Johnny even asks. “If they see you with me …”

 

Johnny cocks his head at him. “Trust me. I’ve gotten away with _much_ worse.”

 

Peter looks back at him, and something stutters in the breath he was taking halfway up his throat — at the easy, happy tilt of Johnny’s grin. At the way he seems so settled in his own body, reaching his hand out for Peter to take. At the slight openness in his face that Peter has never seen before, not on billboards, or news coverage, or the ill-advised cameo on the season finale of some CW teen drama that, in some other world, he and Ned and MJ would be hate-watching together every Tuesday night.  

 

“This isn’t — this isn’t a _joke_ . They took my ... “ _Teammates,_ he should say. _Friends_ , he wishes he could. But the truth is this: they took his heroes.

 

Johnny’s grin loses some of its bravado. “You were one of the …”

 

 _Avengers_. The word takes shape in the air between them, even if Johnny won’t say it out loud, stifling and freeing and terrifying, like some kind of live wire. But then the sirens shift from a whine to a wail, and they both come back to themselves.

 

Mr. Fantastic calls Johnny’s name. Johnny turns, and Peter runs, throwing himself up and up and up onto the darkened rooftops, into the crisp darkness of the air, determined to fight against the hurt that threatens to swallow him whole.

 

* * *

 

“Your whole schtick is helping people, right?”

 

Peter is only half-listening to Natasha, face deep inside of the Shake Shack burger she brought him. It’s been weeks since he’s seen her, enough time that the relief of her shadow passing over his stupid hiding place was so crippling that he almost wanted to cry — but all of that was cast to the side the moment she thrust the still hot paper bag at him. Somewhere around the time he is pawing through the bag for fries like a raccoon he realizes he hasn’t eaten in two straight days.

 

“Schtick?” he asks, once he’s cleared his mouth. “Doesn’t everyone want to help people?”

 

“No.”

 

“You do.”

 

“Yes,” she relents, “but I’m much smarter and less self-sacrificial about it.”

 

“Ouch?”

 

She takes a bite of her own burger, staring out at the East River, where a boat full of waving tourists is gliding by. “I’m only going to say this once: you’re a smart kid. I saw your test scores. I’ve seen Tony’s records of the shit you made from dumpster dives. You want to help people? Go back to school. You can do just as much good with your brain as you can trying to get yourself killed every other day.”

 

“I’m not trying to — “

 

“I don’t want to hear it.”

 

Peter’s throat is almost too thick to speak. Because school isn’t _school_ anymore. It never really was. Peter taught himself whatever he wanted to know; school was just a place to hang out with Ned and MJ, to be a part of the academic decathlon, to be a kid. 

 

“I can’t just … high school is a waste of time.”

 

Natasha snorts at him in this dismissive, affectionate way that reminds him so much of MJ that something tightens in his chest. “Who said anything about high school?”

 

It dawns on him what she means just as she stands back up and brushes the burger crumbs off of herself. She sees the understanding in his expression, and the question just underneath it, and immediately rolls her eyes.

 

“Please, _Andrew_. You can hack your way into an academic roster in your sleep.”

 

She mosies out then, taking her sweet time — she’s dressed as a jogger, with her hair yanked up into a high ponytail, wearing neon spandex and a pair of orthopedic shoes. It is almost a relief, the sudden urge to make fun of her. He hasn’t had the urge to do anything remotely funny in a long, long time.

 

* * *

 

Peter isn’t going to do it, and then he is, and then he isn’t, and then he’s hacking into Columbia’s database and signing himself up for classes, Uncle Ben’s words still worming their way between his ears: _Go big or go home_.

 

He gets himself a job at a coffee shop in July, and starts sleeping in Riverside Park by the Hudson instead of the East River. The Fantastic Four get marginally less terrible at the whole protecting the city thing, so Peter manages not to get fired for ditching his shifts for a full three weeks — enough to save money for two new sets of clothes at Goodwill and textbook rentals.

 

The first day of classes, though, all of his bravado is instantly blown out of him. It was one thing to lie on a form that that he was eighteen. It’s another thing to stand here as his barely seventeen-year-old self, walking among self-assured, recently socialized people who at any moment he is convinced will squint at him, realize he has no business being here, and catch him out.

 

His first class, at least, is a relatively simple one. He has to take a Core Curriculum his freshman year — a mix of science, literature, and physical education classes — which is fine by Peter, seeing as he’s been out of academia for so long that they could sign him up for line dancing and he’d happily take it.

 

In fact, Peter’s almost — well, for lack of a better word, optimistic. There’s something whirring in him, some untapped part of him that he’s neglected for so long that he’s forgotten the feeling of it. The simplicity of being in a place he is supposed to be, the satisfaction of learning something new, the ache of wanting to know more. He is all at once grateful to Natasha for nudging him to do this, to his aunt for always pushing for it, to his uncle for that steady belief he had in Peter from the moment he was born —

 

And then, just as quickly, he is decidedly un-grateful for it. He is decidedly devoid of anything but panic and mild hostility when, of all the people in all of the colleges in this entire ridiculously large planet, the person who sits next to him on his first day in Principles of Economics is one Johnny Fucking Storm.  

 

“You go to Columbia?”

 

The words blurt out of Peter so involuntarily that he might have thrown them up. He can feel his own eyes widening like saucers, his mouth twisting in shock; it’s been so long wearing his mask that his ability to regulate his facial expressions has, apparently, gone to shit.

 

But Johnny Storm doesn’t look like Johnny Storm here — at least, not the Johnny Storm that Peter knows. He’s wearing a baseball cap and scowling, and his cheeks reddening so fast that Peter can almost feel the heat of him from a foot away.   

 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a walking punchline,” Johnny mutters. He sets his laptop on the surface in front of him with a little more force than strictly necessary. ”Why does everyone think I’m, like, a total degenerate?”

 

Peter doesn’t plan on answering. He never does. But this isn’t a conversation in the middle of a battle against some baddie of the week — they’re sitting in tight quarters, in civilian clothes, among actual peers. Peers who are unabashedly staring at them with open mouths.

 

“I … “ Jesus Christ. He’s forgotten how to speak. This isn’t nowhere near the closest proximity he and Johnny have ever been — hell, last week the two of them tumbled out of a window together tangled in each other’s _limbs_ — but there is something so intimate and so unnerving about Johnny looking at his actual face that Peter can’t seem to pull himself together.

 

“It’s the Flame Brain thing, isn’t it?” Johnny lets out a sigh so heavy that it would make half the class turn around, if their eyes weren’t already glued to him. “I mean, come on. I have the same DNA as Sue Storm. I might not be, like, a neuroastronomical whiz kid, but like …”

 

“You have two brain cells to rub together. I get it.”

 

He wants to snatch the words back as soon as he says them — he’s not even sure what possessed him. He hasn’t made a wisecrack in so long that it feels like he just accidentally stumbled into someone else’s body. But then Johnny’s mouth unhinges slightly, and he lets out a laugh, sharp and uninhibited, and something gives way in Peter’s chest.

 

“What’s your name?”

 

The lie is usually poised on the tip of Peter’s tongue, but for the first time in a long time, he hesitates. “Andrew.”

 

“Well, Andy,” says Johnny, leaning back on his chair so far that the legs tilt off of the ground. “How would you like to help me stick it to one Reed Richards?”

 

Peter huffs out a laugh. “And how exactly would I do that?”

 

“Easy,” says Johnny, with a roguish smile. “Help me pass this damn class and prove him wrong.”

 

Months of hating every bone in Johnny Storm’s body is, apparently, not enough to stop him from what happens next. Peter nods, opens his textbook to the first chapter, and says, “Done.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, I have to say that I have never watched Buffy (SORRY I know this a '90s baby cardinal sin), so all coincidences with that name/cause of death are truly an accident that makes me wonder if the universe is just compelling me to watch it now, many moons too late. 
> 
> Second, sorry it's been a long time since I've updated. I got ... well, my friends. I got excellent news. I got the best news a writer can ever get. And someday, when I am not terrified of y'all knowing my civilian identity, I will tell you what that news is. But for now, just know that even if I am not updating here in a timely manner, you MIGHT be reading some words I made up at some point ... but this time, on a page you can hold in your hands ;).


	3. Chapter 3

“Yo, Andy.” 

 

Peter is hunched over a bench, his eyes on the textbook page but his mind far from it. He has 33 dollars left from his job — 33 dollars that, if he’s careful, he can stretch out over two weeks. He can skip breakfast, do dollar pizza for lunch, wait until after dark to scrounge through trash on the Upper East Side for dinner … 

 

“Aaaaandy.” 

 

But he really needs to find another job. Another flexible job, so he can study. And preferably the kind where his absence goes unnoticed when he ducks out to fight crime, the way he inevitably will. 

 

So basically, no job that exists on this island, or possibly in the known universe. 

 

“Andrew Middle Name I Don’t Know Summers.” 

 

Peter looks up in alarm, only to see Johnny Storm’s face inches from his, his brows knit in a frown. 

 

“Oh — hi.” 

 

He stammers the words.  _ Stammers _ . He feels displaced in time for a moment, like he’s some shadow of his 15-year-old self again, and something as innocuous as the presence of another person can set him off his axis. 

 

“ _Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion_.” Johnny shakes his head at him, grinning. “Yeesh, you really are a nerd.” 

 

Peter shrugs, and opens his mouth to say something that deflates out of him before he can try, punctured by the anxiety of figuring out what the heck he is supposed to do  _ now _ . 

 

There’s this stupid part of him that thinks,  _ What would Mr. Stark do?  _ But even that is useless here. Tony was born rich, and would be rich until the day he died. The things Tony have done are admirable, worthy of all the hero worship Peter has never been able to help — but his ability to make them happen didn’t come from scratch. 

 

Peter, on the other hand, comes from less than scratch. He has nothing to his name except a few more dollars and his barely laundered clothes. 

 

“Do you live around here?” 

 

Right. Johnny. Johnny, who is now sitting so close to Peter on this bench that it feels like he’s sitting next to the heat of Uncle Ben’s old lava lamp, the one Peter used to stare at, mesmerized, for hours on end. 

 

“I … Um. Yeah.” 

 

Johnny perks up like a puppy. “We’re neighbors?” 

 

“Well …” 

 

“Do you live in the dorms, or with your folks?” 

 

Peter doesn’t even flinch. He is so used to the aloneness of it all that he doesn’t wake up anymore with that same jolt at realizing that Aunt May isn’t here, that Uncle Ben is long gone and even that his parents are a distant figment of his memory. It’s starting to almost feel — not comfortable, no. But easy. As if it is something his body can adjust to, even if his heart never will. 

 

“The, um ... “

 

There’s a lie poised on the tip of Peter’s tongue, but for some reason he can’t follow through with it. 

 

“Well, it’s no  _ Baxter _ Building,” he says instead, deflecting. 

 

Johnny scoffs. “I’d trade for the dorms in a heartbeat.” 

 

“But then who would do your laundry?” 

 

Johnny’s mouth unhinges, and for a moment, Peter regrets the snide remark. Then Johnny cackles, lifting up his arms and settling one of them around Peter’s shoulders, pulling him in.

 

“Tell ya what. You help me pass physics and I’ll pay for your laundry for  _ life _ .” 

 

Peter’s stomach curls like it’s going to cave in on itself. “I’d settle for a bagel.” 

 

“Done.” 

 

* * *

 

 

Peter has every intention of maintaining the decorum of a regular human being, but Johnny pays for their bagels and Peter eats his fast enough that strangers are staring at him when he finally finishes taking it to the face. Even Johnny’s mouth is slightly ajar at the sight, which is saying something — the other day they fought off a villain with a fish head and man body, and Johnny didn’t so much as flinch. 

 

“Okay, change of plans. I’m taking you to the tower.” 

 

Peter freezes in his seat, the last of the bagel turning into ash in his mouth. “What?” 

 

Johnny pokes Peter’s cheek, which is still full of bagel. “You just ate Ben under the table.” 

 

“Hmm?” 

 

“The Thing,” Johnny clarifies.

 

Peter swallows, the bread thick in his throat. “I can’t go to the tower.” 

 

“Sure you can,” says Johnny, with a cheeky grin. “You’re with me.” 

 

* * *

 

Peter protests all the way up the block. He considers pretending to get a text saying that he needs to get home or go to work, but the old phone he carries around has been dead for months. The only piece of working tech he has is the device on his wrist that keeps him away from old friends and familiar faces, and it’s nothing more than a tiny prison — it can tell him what to do and where to go, but he can’t say a thing. 

 

“I’m — I’m really not that hungry.” 

 

“Yeah, well, I am. And Ben ordered a straight up mountain of Thai food last night.” 

 

Peter’s salivary glands immediately betray him, welling so fast in his mouth he almost chokes on his own spit. 

 

Johnny pats him on the back again. He’s surprisingly strong for someone who doesn’t actually have super strength — that, or maybe Peter’s more off his game than he thinks. “Between the two of us we could crush the leftovers.” 

 

Peter laughs weakly. For the first time, he almost wishes something would attack the city, if only to get him out of this. He can’t even begin to explain the dread he feels about walking into the Baxter Building, but it has so thoroughly seeped under his bones that Johnny may as well be leading him to slaughter. 

 

But his watch is silent as ever — nobody is close by. No MJ, no Ned, no Mr. Stark … nobody at all. 

 

“Andy, careful.” 

 

Johnny’s hand is wrapped around Peter’s elbow, pulling him in just as a delivery guy on a bike whizzes past and nearly flattens him. Peter blinks, stunned, right up into Johnny’s frown. 

 

“You okay?” 

 

No. No, he’s not. For some reason his heart is beating way too fast, almost like it’s beating out of the spot where Johnny’s hand is still wrapped around his arm. And for some reason he didn’t see that delivery guy, when he should have felt the potential danger from a block away. 

 

Then again, that weird sense he has for danger has never quite worked the way it’s supposed to when Johnny is around. 

 

“Yeah,” he lies. “Thanks.” 

 

“Oh my god, Johnny Storm, it’s — I’m — I’m sorry, I’m just the  _ biggest _ fan.” 

 

Something in Johnny’s face starts to slip before Peter even fully registers the group of preteens that has abruptly stopped in front of them. His smile loses some of its sloppiness, his brow cocks, and _ there _ — there he is. The Human Torch. Peter didn’t even realize just how much of a difference there was between the two of them — the Johnny that he talks to in class, and this performative, blustering version of him — until that resentment comes creeping right back. 

 

And Peter’s not even sure what the root of it is. It’s not as though Johnny is unkind. Full of air, maybe, and anything but humble, but still gracious, and patient, and quick to set even the most stammering fans at ease. 

 

But it’s more than self-assurance. It’s cockiness. It’s a little too close to the way Peter used to feel, back when he was invincible, and New York’s skyline was his blank canvas, and he thought he didn’t have anything to lose. 

 

“Sorry about that,” says Johnny sheepishly, after Peter has held about two dozen strangers’ Stark Phones to take pictures for Johnny’s fans. 

 

And Johnny looks like he really means it. As soon as they turn the corner out of sight, he seems to deflate slightly, his shoulders loosening, a self-conscious furrow creasing in his brow. 

 

It occurs to Peter that, for all of his heroics as Spider-Man or Ghost or whatever the hell he is and isn’t now, he has always had the option to hide. Even at fifteen he knew he wanted that option; he blinks, hard, remembering that day Tony offered him a spot on the team with such vivid force that it knocks into his bones like he can will himself back to it. He turned Tony down, and at the time he told himself it was for May’s sake, for the sake of people in Queens — but really, at some deeper level, there was the fear of this. This thing that is happening right now, to Johnny, who never gets to just … be Johnny. 

 

Something unexpected cinches in Peter’s chest, followed by a wave of understanding he is almost reluctant to feel. He pushes it down and says, “Don’t worry about it.” 

 

Johnny’s smile comes back with such immediacy that it’s almost absurd, like Peter just yelled “fetch!” to an overgrown puppy. And then that wave is something more of a tidal wave, something that overtakes him so fast it nearly stalls the breath in his throat. 

 

He’s so overwhelmed by it that it doesn’t even occur to him what a potentially massive mistake he has made following Johnny up to the top floor of the Baxter Building until the elevator doors are sliding open, and a penthouse that rivals Tony Stark’s digs sprawls out into what seems like infinity. 

 

Johnny nonchalantly leads Peter to the kitchen, and Peter can’t help himself — he walks up to the edge of the massive windows, his throat aching at the sight of the city spilling out under their feet. Without his webs, he hasn’t come close to this height in months. He’s forgotten what it feels like, poised at the top of it, brimming with an infinity sandwiched by the East and Hudson rivers. 

 

“Sick, right?” 

 

Johnny’s words are flippant, but his eyes shine with the same awe as Peter’s. It surprises Peter, the way it makes him feel a little bit less alone. 

 

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Sick.” 

 

Then the smell of microwaved pad thai leftovers pushes Peter out of any immediate thought that isn’t  _ food _ .

 

They spend the next few minutes silently gorging, only interrupted when Reed Richards and Sue Storm themselves walk through the kitchen with the kind of haste that says they’re on their way somewhere else, bickering with each other. 

 

“If we use that compound, the fabric will last, what? Two uses? Three?” Sue is asking. 

 

Reed taps something on a tablet. “Better than it losing elasticity halfway through a fight.” 

 

“Exactly how far are you intending to stretch? Manhattan’s only two miles wide — ”

 

“I can go further than what I’m doing now, the suit just won’t allow for it.” 

 

“Reed, if you push yourself too far, you’ll — oh. Johnny. Hi.” 

 

Johnny waves with the hand that isn’t currently engaged wrapping more noodles around his fork. “Yo.” 

 

Reed and Sue both stop and blink at Peter for a moment, like he’s some kind of apparition. Peter has to actively stop himself from scowling at them. He knows it isn’t fair — they’re newer to this whole  _ heroism _ thing than any of the Avengers were — but he can’t help the bubble of resentment that expands in his chest at the sight of them. 

 

“This is Andy,” says Johnny, through a mouthful of food. “We’re studying.” 

 

Sue cocks her head at them. “Huh.” 

 

Johnny’s the one who scowls. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

 

But Reed’s already muttering something under his breath at the tablet, halfway out of the room. Sue rolls her eyes, half in exasperation and half in affection, and starts to follow him. 

 

“Don’t let him burn the complex down,” she says to Peter. 

 

Peter bristles, not expecting the warmth in her tone. “On it.” 

 

Johnny lets out a huff of indignant air. “It was one time.” 

 

“That’s already too many times. Now unless you have a way to increase the tensile strength of a polymer fabric by at least three times its current performance — ”

 

“Has he tried other ways of pressurizing it before converting the compounds into a fabric?” Peter blurts, before he can think the better of it. 

 

Sue blinks at him. 

 

So does Johnny. 

 

“Was any of that English?” Johnny asks. 

 

But Sue is looking at him now with a scrutiny that makes him instantly regret speaking at all. He takes an unnecessarily large bite of a stale spring roll, occupying himself with it until she nods at him, lets out another “huh,” and leaves. 

 

A few moments later there’s the sound of consecutive crashing, whirring, and Sue chastising Reed, all of which doesn’t make Johnny so much as flinch.

 

“C’mon,” he says, rolling his eyes in a way that’s almost comically similar to his sister’s. “We can study in my room.” 

 

Johnny leads him down the hall, and Peter forgets his uneasiness entirely, gaping at everything he passes — equipment he recognizes from Stark labs, or from OsCorp, but tweaked in definitively different ways; tech he can’t imagine the purpose of; tools strewn about the penthouse like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, but nerdier and probably dangerous. 

 

“Sorry,” says Johnny, weaving past a particularly large hunk of something Peter lingers to stare at. “Stark was here the other day and he and Reed and Sue basically vomited science all over the place.” 

 

The door swings open, then, to what can only be Johnny’s room — not quite tidy and not quite messy, but spilling over with the  _ Johnny _ -ness of it. There are posters hung up on the walls — monster trucks and wrestlers and some surfer. The computer is open, with so many tabs open that it rivals Peter’s, back in the days he and Ned were obsessively trying to perfect his web fluid. There are a few odds and ends on the floor; a pair of jeans Peter recognizes with the familiar worn outline in the butt pocket where Johnny always puts his phone, a few books from their classes. 

 

He tries not to stare, wondering if Johnny will get self-conscious — if he’s even capable, that is — but then he reaches the nightstand, and his eyes snag on something and can’t look away. 

 

At first he thinks he’s imagining it, or it’s not what he thinks it is. But he takes a step toward it, and sees that it’s a Spider-Man figurine; one of the little ones vendors used to sell on the edge of Central Park or in Union Square. It’s cheap plastic and a goofy design, just barely recognizably Spider-Man. Michelle made fun of him for them, but then she bought nearly a dozen, handing a few out to May and Ned and even Tony so that they could “use them as voodoo dolls if Peter deserves it”. 

 

He doesn’t realize that he’s crossed the room to pick it up until Johnny clears his throat. 

 

“Sorry,” Peter blurts, setting it back down. 

 

“It’s Spider-Man,” says Johnny, too fast. 

 

Peter swallows. “Yeah. Sorry.” 

 

He doesn’t know why he says it again; because he is, maybe. Sorry that it’s over. Sorry that he can’t be the person Queens depended on him to be. Sorry that he faded out of existence the moment that the world needed him most, and had to go into hiding the moment he got back. 

 

Sorry, sorry, sorry about nothing and everything and too much for one person to hold. 

 

“He was the coolest Avenger.” 

 

The words bring Peter back into the room, his eyes snapping to Johnny’s. Johnny meets his gaze, defensive, like he’s expecting Peter to say it:  _ He wasn’t an Avenger _ . And Peter feels like he should. Like he has some obligation to tear Spider-Man back down, before Johnny can make him feel alive enough again that Peter can miss him. 

 

Instead Peter says, “It’s — too bad.” 

 

Johnny nods, unexpectedly solemn. And then: “I wish …” 

 

Peter blinks up at him, wondering how and when he got so close. Close enough that he can see the fringes of his pale eyelashes, the little upturn at the edges of his lips. 

 

“What?” 

 

Johnny shrugs. “It’s dumb, but — he was my age. I think. And it would have been nice to — I don’t know.” 

 

“Have someone to talk to?” 

 

Johnny looks both relieved and embarrassed at the same time. “Not that he’d — I mean — if he’d even wanted to talk to me.” 

 

Peter surprises himself by putting his hand on Johnny’s shoulder. He almost jerks it back the moment he does it, but then Johnny glances back at him, his eyes just questioning enough that Peter feels like an anchor, like he couldn’t pull away from him right now if he tried. 

 

“I’m — I’m sure he would,” says Peter. 

 

Johnny huffs out a laugh. “Yeah?” he asks, with a wryness in his smile. “What makes you think that?” 

 

Peter takes his hand off Johnny’s shoulder so he can nudge it. “I’m from Queens,” he says, letting the accent out in full force for the first time in months. “We’re allowed to speak for him.” 

 

Johnny’s jaw drops just slightly. “Queens, huh?” he asks, one side of his mouth curling. 

 

Peter flushes, not unaware of the way Johnny leans in when he asks, but not startled by it, either. “Born and bred.” 

 

“You know, I’m from Long Island,” says Johnny, the lilt of his voice changing just slightly, too — like some defense is down. Like there is something unspoken between the two of them that is suddenly louder than their voices combined.

 

“Yeah?” Peter’s voice is breathy, in a way he’s never heard it before. “Well — how have the boroughs been treating you?” 

 

“Not bad.” Johnny’s eyelids lower, and Peter’s heart starts to race — like that sense he has for danger, but so much more. Like it’s beating all over his body. Like he wants more of it, and he somehow innately knows that Johnny is the only source. “But I could definitely use a native to show me around.” 

 

Somehow, then, they are both leaning in — compelled by something magnetic and intangible and beyond Peter’s control.  _ Control _ , the one thing he has never had, the one thing he has tried to exercise over himself since this whole thing began, but for the first time — for the only time — he is willing to surrender it without a fight. Johnny’s eyes start to close, and then Peter’s do too, and he can feel the weight of everything that he is and isn’t in its full force, and it’s  _ okay _ . It feels okay. To be where he is, how he is, exactly as he has been, and then — 

 

And then. 

 

The device on his wrist starts to hum, a quiet alarm. Peter jerks back, staring at it, and sees the initials on the screen: _MJ._ Michelle Jones. The device hums louder, letting him know that she’s not only close, but getting closer by the second.

 

“Andy?” 

 

The name sounds like poison in his ears, tainting the last few minutes, and everything that happened before it; the snap back to reality is so brutal that it feels like it is splintering his bones. 

 

“I have — I have to go.” 

 

The buzz picks up until it’s a whine. Nobody’s ever come this close before. She must be in the building, if not in the compound —  _ shit _ . What on  _ earth _ would she be doing in this compound? 

 

He shakes his head at himself. When has MJ ever been somewhere that someone expected her to be? 

 

“Are you sure?” Johnny’s eyebrows lift, the concern so immediate and palpable that Peter wants to shrink under it, wants to make himself disappear. Then his eyes dart to the device on Peter’s wrist. “Is … everything okay?” 

 

“Yes.”  _ No _ . “I — I’m sorry. I’ll — ”  _ Call you _ , he wants to say, but he doesn’t have a phone, let alone a number Johnny can reach him on. “I’ll see you in class. I’m sorry.” 

 

“Andy — ”

 

Peter takes off, bolting for the elevator, and then skidding to a halt when the device picks up again; Michelle is coming  _ up _ the elevator. It’s the only explanation. He strains his senses, relying on his enhanced hearing to find the slight echo of the stairwell, and makes a break for it, crossing the foyer just as the elevator doors slide open and confirm his worst fear and greatest relief: Michelle Jones, clad in a ripped up pair of black jeans and an oversized denim jacket, her hair in a frizzy halo around her head, her eyes glued onto something on her phone. 

 

He doesn’t stare. He can’t afford it. But the image of her brands itself into him like a scar, and even in the split second it takes for him to duck into the stairwell he knows it is one that will never heal. 

 

He races down the stairs, breathless, all sixty-something flights. As he emerges back into the autumn wind and the bright sun, he tries and fails to shake it off — the hurt in Johnny’s eyes. The wholeness of MJ. The ache in his chest that extends out to every part of him, throbbing and pushing and pulling until there is no sense of what is him and what isn’t, what’s imagined and what’s real. 

 

And that’s when it happens — a split second, a fragile moment, the rare and impossible one that Peter lets his guard down. 

 

Someone presses something cool and hard to the back of his neck. 

 

“Peter Parker,” says the voice, with a chilling kind of calm.

 

He doesn’t deny it. It almost feels good not to pretend. 

 

“What do you want?” 

 

 

A beat. "Nothing the likes of  _you_ can ever give." 

 

He's going to die. He knows it. But there still isn't enough time to come to terms before he hears the sound of the weapon's  _click_. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GUYYSSSS, thank you so much for your kind words. I'm very excited and terrified and all of the things about Book, which I have learned will be published in early 2020. It is all very surreal, and very much has nothing to do with superheroes (although it is YA!!), but I am hoping that breaking this far into the ~business~ means that at some point I'll be able to write about Teens With Superpowers (TM), which I also have a separate series about (which has nothing to do with Spider-Man, but is def influenced by my years long obsession with him). 
> 
> All of this said, I could not have done any of this without you guys. I've written like six full manuscripts that didn't sell before this one that did, and although I have never dreamed of giving up, I will say that your guys' support and this fandom specifically have always, always, ALWAYS made me feel empowered to keep pushing through the hard times, particularly when I had to take a break from writing fic earlier this year to make this one that sold happen. Publishing is terrifying and exhausting and takes way longer than you think it will, but guys! Keep pushing! Hufflepuff the fuck out of it, and just keep writing until something sticks! It is all very possible. The future is fan fiction readers and writers, of that I am certain — so if you are on the fence about putting your original work out there, or even making it in the first place, I am here to tell you that THIS IS YOUR TIME. Go forth and create! Nobody knows the way readers/writers respond to work quite like people in the fic community do. You have the tools you need. Just keep pushing until something breaks through. 
> 
> (Should mention that I am still v much working in a day job, and everyone should always keep their day job for safety's sake, but publishing is still v exciting!! Even if it does not, y'know. Pay all ya bills.) 
> 
> GO MAKE SHIT, Y'ALL. And thank you as always for reading mine :).


	4. Chapter 4

The _click_ against Peter’s neck is abruptly followed by another; Natasha swims into view, a gun with a silencer cocked in her hands, just a beat too late.

The world starts to spin. Capsize. He’s drowning in it, the sounds and the colors, the sirens and cement. He tries to meet Natasha’s eyes, tries to understand what’s happening, but he can’t move his head. He’s falling, falling —

No. The man behind him is falling. There’s a _thud_ , and his attacker is on the ground, in a pool of blood that expands around his head.

“Is he dead?”

Peter asks, or he thinks he asks it. His tongue is thick and his teeth feel huge, like his mouth doesn’t belong to him anymore. He stumbles forward — he doesn’t want the man to die, he doesn’t want _anyone_ to die — and Natasha yanks him by his elbows, keeping him upright.

“It’s going to be okay,” she tells him, which is how he knows that it’s not. He can feel the heat of something that shouldn’t be there boiling in his veins, spreading through his body like fire, but he could ignore that. What he can’t ignore is that, for the first time in the shared history of the shit they’ve been through, Natasha is trying to soothe him. Which can only mean he is about to die.

He’s not even sure if the words are coming out of his mouth. “Is he dead?” he asks again, even though he knows.

Natasha doesn’t answer him, hooking her arms around his to hold him upright. “I need backup. 43rd and Vanderbilt. Summers is down.”

 _Summers_. That’s him. Is he down?

Natasha stabs a needle into his arm. “Antidote,” she mutters in explanation.

But Peter doesn’t care. All he can see is red. Blood on the street, blood on his shoes. He should be used to it by now, but — ”Is he dead?”

“Yes,” Natasha finally tells him. “And good fucking riddance.”

* * *

 

When he comes to, there is an immediate and childish expectation that his aunt will be by his side. Reality crushes back into him before he opens his eyes, but it does nothing to ease the sharp hurt of it — so much more acute and lasting than the rest of the pain, which beats through his body like a constant throb.  

When he does open is eyes, he finds himself in semi-darkness. A basement, cramped and small, with low, oppressive ceilings. In the moments it takes for him to fully come to, he is too weak to filter the noise the way he usually can, and it comes at him full blast — the hissing brakes of a city bus, the whine of a child, the scurry of rats in the walls. The noise swells until it reaches a cacophony, and then a conclusion — he’s in Hell’s Kitchen, and he’s alone.

There is a glass of water on the nightstand. He chugs half of it, and feels some force of life rush back into his bones, and with it so much else — he is terrified, and furious, and too weak to let himself feel any of it. Instead he just sits there on the threadbare cot, shaking, holding the empty glass until the plastic splinters between his fingers.

There’s no note. No nothing. He closes his eyes, hearing the whole world at once, fragments of it pushing him back into place even as it pulls him away: _“It’s the middle of the damn week, what does she expect?”_ some man says.

Middle of the week. Tuesday? Wednesday? Either way, he’s been out for days.

He pulls himself up, and resents every moment of it. He doesn’t want to be here. Not _here_ here, but here. On this planet, or this plane, or whatever this existence is — in this place without Ben and May. This place where he can be mere feet away from MJ, but can’t speak to her. This place where he can feel the rumble of something he shouldn’t feel for Johnny in his chest, but has to lie to him every time he opens his mouth.

This place that reminds him that he is just one of infinite, inconsequential Peters — ones whose parents are alive, ones who don’t live in New York, ones who never existed at all. He felt so many versions of himself beyond that veil Thanos pushed them into, versions that branded themselves under his skin forever, and most of the time he can forget. But in moments like this, his ears ringing, his lungs screaming for air, his body too weak to push it back, they are all a part of him at once. Every beautiful, ugly thing that has and hasn’t happened; every ugly, beautiful thing that never will.

Nobody is coming. Not Natasha. Not whoever saved his life. He knows it and understands it — they are clearly in more danger than even Peter realized — but it still pulses in him like some kind of drum, revealing an emptiness in him that he doesn’t want to face. He is untethered by it. Floating. Not quite real. He feels like he could close his eyes again, lay back and sleep for eternity, without one soul knowing the difference.

 _Except Johnny_ , says some unfamiliar voice in his head. One that almost sounds like him, or maybe the boy that he used to be. _Johnny would know. Johnny would care_.

The thought is a dangerous one, straddled between absurd and life-saving, hovering there until Peter takes a breath and comes back to himself and dismisses the whole thing altogether. He has something to live for. Too much to live for. This city, and the people in it who need his help. This world, and the constant danger it is in, even without Thanos waiting in the wings.

If he’s alive, it’s not for his own sake. It’s because he isn’t finished yet. It’s because there is still so much left to do, and he is one of the few left to do it.

So he pulls himself up. Throws back the glass of water. Swallows back the bile that threatens to come up immediately after. The he does the only thing he still knows how to do: he goes on.

 

* * *

 

It takes another day or so for him to right himself. He spends most of it on the edge of the East River, trying to regain his strength, only venturing out to find food in trash cans — but it’s getting colder. There are fewer people out, and there’s less to go around. His muscles are stiff and out of practice, the dark of night comes too fast, and his body is too weak to even shiver properly to stave it off.

It takes until Friday for him to feel settled enough to go to class. He tries to take it easy, sitting in the back, pulling his hood up over his head, giving himself permission to tune out if he needs to — he already knows what’s going on in this class.

“Andy?”

He flinches. Johnny all but drops his books on lectern space next to his, settling into a chair and leaning in so close that Peter can smell the cinnamon of his gum, the pine of his deodorant, the sweet and musky _Johnny-_ ness of him that he didn’t even know he’d committed to some part of his brain.

“Where have you … I mean, I haven’t …”

Peter clears his throat, refusing to look at him. “I’ve been — I got the flu.”

“Oh.”

He can feel Johnny staring at him, the heat of his eyes more intense than his actual flames. Peter can feel his own face reddening — he hates this. Some part of it. Either the way he is disarmed by something as innocuous as the sound of Johnny’s voice, or that he isn’t allowed to be disarmed by anything in the first place.

“So when you left the tower the other day …”

“I — ” Peter forgot about that, honestly. Not running into MJ, but the events that preceded it — that he owed Johnny some kind of explanation for sprinting out of his bedroom the way he did.

Actually, it is all a little murky now. He remembers being at Johnny’s. He remembers the ping on his wrist, and leaving before MJ could see him. He remembers the moment the needle when into his neck, and hearing Natasha’s voice. But everything else …  

He hasn’t even given it much thought, until now. Until Johnny is looking at him with something that almost seems defensive; with something that seems to take up space between them that Peter doesn’t know the shape of, let alone know how to navigate. He closes his eyes for a brief moment, feeling it press into him — a something, or an almost-something, that he should remember.

But whatever it is, it’s too far out of reach. Buried under everything else — the worry that he hasn’t heard from Natasha in days, that he still doesn’t know who attacked him or if they’ll strike again, that he may not be able to live much longer like this regardless.

“There was a …” _Family emergency,_ he almost says, but the lie of it is too much. He has no family now. “I, uh …”

Someone sits on the other side of him, a meaty guy who shoves into Peter with his backpack, inadvertently knocking his hood off of his head. Once Johnny gets a clear view of him, his eyes bulge.

“Shit. You look … are you okay?”

Peter bites the inside of his cheek, burning under Johnny’s concern. “I really am sorry about — I didn’t mean to leave like that. I didn’t want to.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s whatever, let’s talk about how you kind of look like you just crawled out of a crypt.”

Peter tries to laugh, and it comes out as a wheeze. Johnny’s eyebrows raise in alarm.

“Should you even be here?”

Okay, he can’t possibly look _that_ bad. But then Johnny reaches out and puts his hand on Peter’s shoulder, and only under the steadiness of it does Peter realize that he’s shaking. That even in this well-heated room full of warm bodies he can’t seem to shake off the cold of his time on the street. That already he is dreading going back out there, somehow even more than he is dreading the end result of whatever is brewing in Johnny’s eyes right now.

“I’m okay, really,” he says. It’s a lie, but for some reason, with Johnny’s hand on his arm, it doesn’t feel like one. “Or at least I will be once I’m caught up in this class.”

Johnny perks up at that. “Hey, I actually understood yesterday’s lecture! I can catch you up.”

Peter doesn’t actually need catching up, but maybe the part of his brain that responds to logic got eaten out by the would-be assassin’s poison that’s still filtering out of his veins. “You don’t mind?”

“You busy after class?”

Peter can feel the hot glares of several people in various places of the classroom, hearing the entire conversation, their heartbeats picking up to a rhythm that Peter has come to recognize as jealousy. He wants to look out at them and laugh. This thing with Johnny isn’t like that; he knows better than to think someone like Johnny would ever be into someone like him.

Well. “Ghost” aside. But Ghost isn’t Peter. Or at least — he wishes it weren’t.

He’s about to say no, worried Johnny will suggest the tower again. He can’t risk it. But then Johnny says, “A friend of mine works at the coffee shop down the street, if you want to …”

“Oh. Yeah. Let’s, uh — sounds good.”

The glares intensify. Peter slinks into his seat, just as Johnny perks up in his. “Sweet.”

* * *

 

“So, um, you should know Reed’s kind of obsessed with you now.”

Peter takes a ridiculously long drag of his hot chocolate, feeling the warmth and the richness of it restore something in him that makes him feel like he’s on the verge of giddiness, drunk on heat and sugar and the taste of something that didn’t spend hours in the garbage before entering his mouth.

As soon as he processes Johnny’s words he nearly chokes on it. “What?”

Johnny doesn’t seem to notice, frowning at something in his textbook. “Yeah, yeah — whatever suggestion you made to Sue about the suits? It totally worked.”

Great. That’s exactly what Peter needs. To _help_ Ross’s puppets take center stage.

But still, he can’t ignore the slight thrill, the crackle of something he hasn’t quite felt since the days he spent wandering in and out of Tony’s workshops or stuffing the disastrous results of web fluid gone wrong under a desk in shop class. It’s nice, to have something as concrete as a problem that has a solution. Most of the ones he’s facing now are too wide to even have an end.

“Nice,” says Peter lamely, staring down at the half-scarfed scone on his plate. “I’m glad.”

“Actually, you know, he’s looking for interns — ”

“Oh, I couldn’t — ”

“ — since MJ bowed out unexpectedly.”

 _MJ_ . The aftertaste of the chocolate seems a little bitter, hearing Johnny call her that; knowing that it can only mean MJ _let_ him call her that. It’s a little too close to the twinge he felt when he realized Tony had designed all their suits, that he was on casual terms with Johnny, too. Like Peter left some kind of gap in the universe that Johnny all too easily filled.

“But if you’re not interested — ”

“Bowed out?” Peter asks, the words snagging on his ears a beat after they should have. “What do you mean?”

“Oh. Reed’s intern just kind of like, quit out of the blue. Said there were other things she needed to focus on, I don’t know, she was _super_ vague.” Johnny sighs into his coffee. “I’m gonna miss her. She’s savage. Really knew how to tear Ben a fresh one.”

“Yeah, she’s — ” _Great,_ Peter was about to say, because he’s an even bigger dumbass than he ever imagined.

“More cocoa?” asks the bright-eyed barista in a large, plaid statement coat, saving him from his own idiocy. “On the house.”

Peter blinks up into the round earnestness of her face and could legitimately cry.

“Thanks, Dorie,” says Johnny, answering for him.

She pours it into Peter’s now empty mug and says, “Just holler if you want more. You, uh, look like you need it.”

“Hey, be nice to my friends.”

Dorie sticks her tongue out at him. “Maybe if you stop treating my tables like your own personal napkin,” she says, nodding at the impressive amount of crumbs Johnny’s cookie left in its wake.

“Anyway,” says Johnny, “you’re probably, like, way too busy for an internship anyway, but Reed wanted me to float it by you just in — ”

The entire cafe shakes out from underneath them, the _boom_ from outside unmistakably not of normal New York noise origins. Johnny’s eyes are on the window in an instant, just as Peter closes his own and listens — something is rumbling beneath them, and whatever it is, it’s coming from underground.

The sound of screaming on the street immediately drowns out everything else. Peter reaches for his backpack, where the black pieces of his Ghost attire are shoved under his books, but Johnny puts a hand on his wrist.

“Stay here,” he says, mistaking the gesture for something else. “It’s safer.”

Peter is about to protest, but then he remembers — he’s not a hero, here. Not Spider-Man, or a would-be Avenger, or even Ghost. He’s just … Andrew. He’s someone that Johnny thinks he needs to protect.

He’s already on his feet, though, as Johnny slides out of his sweatshirt, revealing his uniform is on underneath. Peter’s breath catches in his throat, and his rises up to his feet, the adrenaline surging — all of it punctured at once by the look of genuine fear on Johnny’s face.

“No, seriously, Andy. _Stay here_.”

Johnny looks back, as if Dorie is going to enforce this, but the girl is nowhere to be found. Peter forces himself to nod, and then adds, “Be careful.”

There’s a beat where Johnny is unexpectedly solemn, and the two of them almost seem to share a quiet kind of understanding — but it’s gone as fast as it comes, when Johnny’s lip curls into a smirk and he says, “Where’s the fun in that?”

And then he’s off, leaving Peter trying not to groan in his wake. Another immediate quake of the ground beneath him snaps him back into action, his body so immediately poised to fight and defend that it cancels out everything else. He scans the coffee shop — everyone has fled to the back — then takes the split second to rifle in his bag and don his makeshift uniform, throwing himself into the fray.

Well, not throwing himself, so much as slinking into the fray. He knows the mere fact of someone attacking him the other day means he has been nowhere near subtle enough to keep up his new alter-ego — but he also knows that, given the size of the drill that literally just pierced through the intersection at 113th and Amsterdam, that subtlety is out the window.

Especially because it is all too clear that whatever is happening, Johnny is fighting it alone.

To Peter’s surprise, Johnny seems to take it in stride. It’s nothing like the earlier days, when he seemed to just throw a hit in any direction and hope it would land. Peter can see the calculation in his eyes, the quick but careful consideration for his surroundings and the people in them, the way he seems to anticipate instead of just react. For a moment Peter just lurks and doesn’t do anything; for once, there is no mess to clean up after, and nobody to save.

What happens next is something neither of them see coming — just as the drill pierces the cement and starts working its way up Amsterdam, the noise of it drowns out the sound of something else that pierces through the sky. Some kind of weapon that is extremely and specifically honed in on Johnny — who is, all things considered, a heat-seeking missile’s wet dream.

Johnny seems to realize this in the same moment that Peter does. Peter watches from a block away as his eyes widen, brightened by the weapon’s glare, all of him exposed; as Johnny tries to fly up into the sky to avoid it; as Johnny’s face sets itself into a grim finality, already understanding that it’s moving too fast for him to avoid.

There is nothing Johnny can do. But there is something _Peter_ can. The only way he can think of to make Johnny move faster than he can in-flight — the only way he can think of to pull him from the weapon’s path.

He shouldn’t even have his webs. It’s not just a risk, but a betrayal — to Nat, to Tony, to anyone who has tried to help him along the way. But in this moment, there is no consequence worse than losing Johnny; in this moment, there is no other choice than to let his web fly, let it hook into Johnny, and _tug_.

The next few seconds seem to happen in gut-wrenching slow motion. The weapon narrowly misses Johnny, just as the drill surges upward and nearly guts him in its place. The split second Peter yanks him is crucial. If he’d hesitated even a moment, or jumped the gun too soon, there is no doubt that Johnny would be dead.

Instead, Johnny ends up falling right on top of Peter, the two of them stumbling to the ground and rolling from the impact of it.

For a moment they are both paralyzed, too stunned to collect themselves. Johnny is physically on top of him, the weight of him so steady and the beat of his heart so compelling that Peter almost forgets to move. If it weren’t for Sue and Reed shouting as they arrived the scene, stirring him out of it, he may never have moved at all.

“Are you okay?” he asks Johnny, as Johnny scrambles to get off of him, his face redder than a traffic signal. It would be more satisfying, having this kind of effect on Johnny, if the whole thing weren’t built on a lie.

Johnny just gapes at him, his face ashen, his eyes like moons. “Ghost,” he wheezes. “I thought — it’s been days, I thought maybe you were …”

And then it happens. He looks down at his waist, as the web fluid still sticking to him, and traces the roots of it back to Peter’s wrist. Then his eyes meet Peter’s, the recognition in them so intense and visceral that it slams into Peter like a bus.

“No fucking _way_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all ................ bless you for your patience. I am neck deep in edits for that, uh, undisclosed project. And also starting another undisclosed "project" that will be arriving at some point after that one, because the universe is whiplash-y and great. Thankfully, there is plenty of fan fic to write, so there will always be a soft and lovely place to land <3\. 
> 
> To the beautiful Tumblr anon who prompted me on the "5 times Peter was just like Tony Stark (+1 time he was better)" — LOVE THE FUCK OUTTA THAT IDEA, and I am working on it :). Just wanna make some more headway before I start posting chapters, so I make sure that I can stay up to date with both this and yet another 5+1 that ends with more emotions than anyone signed up for (myself included). Stay tuned!! 
> 
> ALSO! GUYS!! I'm seeing the Spider-Verse movie early this week. So get ready for me to shit post rainbows and happiness. You can find me at @upcamethesun on Tumblr, as always! Feel free to drop me prompt ideas for one-shots, 5+1s, what have you. I am slow-moving but eager.
> 
> In the meantime, thanks for reading, and for sticking with me in these long spells between chapters. I appreciate it and you guys more than y'all will ever know.


	5. Chapter 5

“You’re — ”

Peter clamps a hand over Johnny’s mouth. 

“Pmmr-Mmf!” Johnny manages to blurt out between Peter’s gloved fingers. 

“No! I’m not! Shut up!” Peter blurts, and just like that he’s fifteen again, trying to shut Karen off as she reminds him about his curfew. 

Johnny stumbles back, disconnecting his face from Peter’s hand. “No,  _ you _ shut up. You just — those webs are — ”

“Johnny — ”

“Either you, like, stole them from a corpse, which is super creepy and  _ super _ wrong, or — ”

“They’re  _ mine _ ,” Peter says, before he can think the better of it. 

He has an out here. He should take it back. Admit to stealing them, or copying them, whatever it takes to throw Johnny off his trail. But their eyes connect through Peter’s mask, and he understands in that moment that it would be like shattering a window and trying to put the pieces back together. 

Johnny stares at him, both of them breathing too hard, too fast. Peter can practically see him trying to relive every encounter they’ve had in the last few months, so viscerally that he can’t help but relive them, too – 

“Oh my god. You’re alive. Oh my  _ god _ .” 

Fuck. Shit. Crap. Fuck — 

“Oh my god.”

This time the words are quiet, almost reverent. He stares at Peter, those blue eyes swimming with too much all at once — not pity, but empathy. Not knowledge, but an understanding that seems deeper than it, reaching into places that Peter is too reluctant to let him see. 

He doesn’t know what to do, what to say. 

It’s more than he thought Johnny was capable of. It’s more than he can take. 

A crash from above snaps them both back to attention — The Thing has arrived just behind the Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic. Johnny’s communicator lights up on his wrist, the voice of his sister blaring through the alley. 

“Johnny, are you okay?” 

“F-fine.” 

“Stay down there. Whatever this is, it’s heat-seeking. And you’re … well …” 

“Hot,” Johnny says faintly, without a trace of his usual cockiness. He’s still staring at Peter — at Ghost — 

At Spider-Man. 

“Listen,” Peter starts, but Johnny beats him to the punch. 

“Who else knows?” 

Peter should lie. Spin this, maybe, so it sounds like it’s an underground thing, so Johnny thinks that Ross is on board and that Peter isn’t actually on the run with half a dozen other Avengers and would-be ones. 

But it’s Johnny. And for some stupid reason, that makes him someone Peter can’t lie to anymore. 

“You,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. “And one other person.” 

Johnny stares at him, his face slowly but steadily shifting into some kind of resolve. Peter holds his breath, even though he is sure what is on the other side of that resolve — so sure that, for a moment, he is almost relieved that Johnny knows. 

It’s a relief that is swiftly punctured with the reminder that his relief is selfish. Maybe, for a moment, it will be easier on him — but he’s put Johnny in danger. And Johnny doesn’t even know it. 

“I won’t tell anyone,” says Johnny. “Your secret’s safe with me.” 

Peter believes him. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that someone is trying to kill him, and now that same someone might have a reason to try to kill Johnny, too. 

“You’re gonna do that thing where you disappear again, aren’t you?” 

Peter finally lets out the breath he is holding, so lightheaded that he thinks if the ground shakes from under them one more time he might just topple with it. “Yeah. Probably.”

Johnny’s eyes are conflicted, like he’s going to protest. Instead he says, “What happened to you?” 

Peter can’t tell if he’s asking about  _ you _ as in all of them, or  _ you _ as in Peter. Maybe it’s both. Either way, the answer is one Peter can’t give. 

There’s another  _ crunch _ then, and a chorus of screams, and their time is up. Peter sprints out of the alley, toward the sounds of civilians, leaving Johnny gobsmacked in his wake. 

* * *

 

His skin is crawling by the time they diffuse most of the chaos. There’s likely some would-be supervillain origin story behind the gigantic street-crumbling drill and the missile, but Peter, at least, doesn’t have to concern himself with getting to the bottom of that anymore. It’s the problem of  _ Johnny _ that is suddenly too large for him to wrap his head around. 

To be fair, Johnny was already a problem. Someone knows Peter is alive. Knows well enough that they called him by his given name. And while Natasha took care of whoever it was, he has no guarantees that they are taken care of completely; that there aren’t more people out there with some reason for wanting him dead. Anyone near him, as Peter, Ghost, Andrew, what  _ have _ you — they’re in danger at all times. 

No. Natasha would have stuck around to tell him, if she hadn’t resolved the threat. He may not claim to know her well, but he knows her well enough to know that. 

Unless something happened to her. 

He has always thought of Natasha as invincible. Immortal, even. Like she would be the last one standing at the end of the world. 

But if there’s anything Peter should have come to accept in the last year, it’s that death doesn’t listen to rules, or logic, or reason. It just happens. On a planet light years away, or on a balmy afternoon on a school day. Not one of them is safe. 

For now, though, he can only do what he is supposed to do — which is be where Johnny needs him to be. Safe and accounted for. Not as himself, but as Andrew. 

He slinks back into the cafe where Johnny left him, only a beat before Johnny shows up himself. It feels like something small cracks in his heart at the way Johnny’s eyes sweep the place — at the earnest, genuine worry in his eyes. The crack immediately fills itself with more guilt that Peter knows how to absorb. 

“Oh,” says Johnny, spotting Peter when he waves from behind the barista bar, as if he’s been hiding here the whole time. “Andy! You’re — shit. Are you okay?”  

“Fine,” says Peter — except that he feels almost knocked off his axis by the way Johnny rushes up to him, by the  _ swoop _ of something that must have been hollow in him before suddenly filling up with the way Johnny is staring. 

“But …” 

“Are  _ you _ okay?” Peter asks — both because Andrew isn’t supposed to know, but because he didn’t see how the fight ended, in his rush to get bystanders out of the way. 

Johnny nods. “But Andy …”

He reaches up then, his fingertips skimming Peter’s cheek. Only then does he register the sticky warmth of blood just before he finally feels the faint sting of it. Nothing major — probably just some debris from earlier — but whatever it is, it’s got Johnny’s eyes on him more intensely than they’ve ever been, with the kind of concern Peter knows he doesn’t deserve. 

“Um — glass. From the window,” Peter stammers. “It’ll be fine by tomorrow.” 

Johnny lets out an anxious laugh. “Yeah, if you were a mutant, maybe.” 

Oh. Right. “I’m sure it looks worse than it is,” says Peter, in the most un-mutant way he possibly can. 

“You could come back to the tower — have someone take a look at it — ”

Peter shakes his head. “No, no, it’s — let’s — I’m sure there are people who still need help. We can help organize, make sure there isn’t anyone trapped in the surrounding buildings — ”

“You’ve done that kind of thing before?” 

Peter flushes. “I’m a New Yorker. It kind of comes with the territory.” 

“Right,” says Johnny, with this curl of a smile that looks something like respect. “Well — let’s get to it then.”

 

* * *

 

Peter doesn’t want to like Reed Richards. He doesn’t even want to tolerate Reed Richards. But now that he’s in the aftermath of something as Andrew, and not Ghost — as someone who is visible, and not hiding in the shadows — he can’t hide from him. Not when Reed spots him trying to reunite a little girl with her dad just after the drill was contained, and not when Reed essentially accosts him a few hours later, once the chaos has wound down. 

“You’re Andrew,” he says. His eyes are filled with that same manic energy that Peter has seen in Tony’s eyes, in Bruce’s, in MJ’s — the energy of someone who finds problems, or has problems that find them. The energy of someone who thrives off of trying to solve them, whether they have solutions or not. 

Peter’s tongue feels too thick to speak. It’s unnerving, looking at Reed as himself, and not behind a mask. “I am.” 

“Your advice — about the suit — phenomenal,” says Reed, speaking in broken sentences, tripping over himself with an excitement that is so innate and familiar to Peter that he already feels months’ worth of resentment starting to slide off his skin. “You should have seen it in action — the fabric, just now, the way it expanded — I can’t thank — you have to come work for me.” 

The  _ no _ is poised right on the tip of Peter’s tongue. He’s rehearsed it, almost relished in the idea of it, since Johnny first mentioned Reed’s interest. And even if it weren’t for that — he knows the rules. Lay low. Stay out of sight. Do what Tony asked him to do, after all the strings Tony pulled to keep him free. 

But this — this isn’t freedom. It’s misery. He can’t remember the last time he slept, if only because he dreads the moment when he opens his eyes again. He needs something to live for, something to  _ work _ toward. Something that he sees reflected back at him in Reed’s gaze, a passion that he used to have that the last year has steadily beaten out of him at every turn. 

There will be hell to pay if Tony finds out. But if anything, that only settles Peter’s resolve even more — only then does he feel it, simmering just under the surface. 

He’s angry. Angry at Tony, for all but abandoning him. Angry at himself for thinking Tony wouldn’t. Angry at the idea of wasting his entire life to keep a promise to a man who has probably moved so far past him that he doesn’t give a passing thought to whether Peter is alive or dead. 

Peter takes a hesitant breath, not quite sure if he’s going to do it even as he does. Reed mistakes it for something else, and blurts: “It’ll pay. Generously.” 

Peter doesn’t want money — but he sure does need it. 

“Alright,” he says. He waits for the pinch of regret, but it doesn’t come. “I’m in.” 

* * *

 

Peter doesn’t sleep that entire week. He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. For Johnny to think he’s doing right by him, and tell someone in charge that Spider-Man is still alive. For Johnny to slip up and say something to one of the others, who will undoubtedly tell Ross. For the world to start burning around him again, because fire is his new normal, the expectation more than the fear.

But nothing happens. 

Well, things happen. Inconvenient ones. 

It turns out the attacks are being orchestrated from some as-of-yet-unnamed group outside of the U.S., angry at the country’s withholding of its relief resources in the wake of all the destruction wrought by Thanos. At this point it isn’t even all that surprising. A lot of heat — both figurative and literal — has been on the U.S., since people traced the origins of the first attack ships to New York, and since most of the responding Avengers were of American origins. The fact that those Avengers saved the literal cosmos from imploding — some of them with the price of their own lives — does not seem to resonate with angrier areas of the world that are still trying to pull themselves up from out of the chaos. Another un-surprise, seeing as Ross and his cronies have spun a narrative about the Avengers so toxic that they look more responsible for the damage than responsible for putting an end to it. 

It’s all mired in a global sociopolitical circus that Peter struggles to catch up on using the university computers between classes, the kind of circus he knows that MJ is probably elbows deep in herself. Which is what prompts him to do something he ordinarily never would, and open an incognito window, and look up MJ’s Twitter. 

There she is, her middle finger obscuring a good half of her face in her profile picture.  _ get in, loser, we’re saving the world, _ reads her profile. And then:  _ global outreach intern @SIIrelief _ . 

He can’t help it. He clicks in.  _ Stark Industries International Relief _ , reads the profile.  _ Supporting the rehabilitation and growth of communities affected by the Deep Space Event.  _ There’s a pinned tweet, an image that feels like someone plucked some vital vein to his heart: Pepper, standing at a podium at a conference, flanked by MJ with a clipboard, a full suit with her scuffed up sneakers, and her chin jutted out with her usual Resting “Come At Me” Face. 

He clicks out of it, but not before a video starts autoplaying on the timeline. The sound is off, but he can see the captions under it, spelling out the words coming out of Tony’s mouth: “Yeah, we’re taking applications. Get me a few more punks like Michelle here and there’s nothing we won’t be able to do.” 

Peter closes his eyes. Tries to interpret whatever it is that’s brewing in him, burning from the inside out.  _ Fuck a Stark Industry, _ MJ said to him and Ned, more times than he could count.  _ I think a part of my soul left my body when your little friend just looked at me, _ Tony said once when he cruised past Peter’s school. 

He should be happy. These two people who are so important to him, now banded together, helping save the world. 

But it feels like he’s been stumbling through a room in the dark, only to find out the walls are much closer together than he thought they were; he’s too close to the old world, too close to what might have been, what  _ should _ have been. Too close to the world where he’s also at Tony and Pepper’s side, taking MJ’s shit and feeling like a part of something. Like he can make a difference. Like he  _ matters _ . 

Just then the air is pierced by a dozen student’s phones blaring emergency warnings at once. Peter glances at the girl’s next to his — sees the words  _ Fire _ and  _ Columbus Circle _ and gets up from his chair so fast that he almost forgets to log himself out of the computer. 

It takes an absurdly long time to get there without his webs, but he can’t afford to take chances — especially once he’s on the scene and sees that southwest corner of Central Park has basically turned into a disaster zone. 

The Fantastic Four are have seemingly neutralized the immediate threat. Peter takes a beat to absorb what’s happening — another hole in the ground, cement torn up, which means stranded straphangers in the subway cars below. He immediately shifts his focus downward, slipping into the Columbus Street station just before the first responders arrive. 

“Help! Is there anyone out there?” 

The smoke is overwhelming, seizing in his lungs, but it’s nothing Peter isn’t used to. He holds onto what little breath he has left and pushes through the wreckage, following the sounds of voices. 

“Someone’s coming — I think I hear something!” 

“Jesus, hurry, the fucking train’s on fire — ”

“How can you be sure?” 

“I  _ hear _ it — ”

Peter’s heart is in his throat, the skin of his hands screaming in agony as he reaches to pull burning rubble out of the way, his body moving like a machine. The immediate cries for help are excruciating, but it’s the people who aren’t crying out that are worse — he can hear the wheezing, the heightened pulses, the quiet, whispered prayers. Every gasp and curse and quiet assurance from passengers still too far away for him to see with his own eyes, let alone help. Dozens of strangers, all of them a part of him, their fear swelling into his own. 

May used to scold him for this. For the way he dove right into danger, without considering the consequences. And he pretended every time to take it to heart, but they both knew even then that there was far too much of  _ her _ in him to really listen — to do anything in these moments but think of the people who need him, and not what it will take to get there. 

The small cluster of people who have broken out of the train erupt into cheers when Peter finally makes it through; despite the panic, there is order, and every single one of them moves aside to push the children into his arms first. Peter fills his arms up with a baby and a toddler, then instructs the two older kids to follow him, before snaking them through the hole he’s made to let the out.

He’s expecting a firefighter to meet them on the other end. Instead, he sees Johnny Storm. 

“I gotcha,” says Johnny, taking the screaming toddler from Peter’s arms. He spares a second for Peter. “You okay, Ghosty?” 

Peter is so relieved at the teasing nickname that he almost forgets the pain in his hands. “Never better,” he says. “I made a path — “

“On it,” says Johnny, passing another kid off to a responder and diving in. 

Peter follows close behind, watching with unintentional awe as Johnny moves through the flames without flinching, as he moves burning rubble to the side, mindful so it doesn’t graze Peter. 

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” says Johnny. 

It’s one of his usual running jokes, but there’s an underlying current to it now:  _ You can trust me.  _ Johnny is going to pretend nothing has changed, and he’s letting Peter pretend it, too. 

Maybe that’s why, for once, Peter lets himself banter back: “At least not if I’m going to keep forgetting my oven mitts.” 

Johnny laughs sharply just before they emerge back out to the other side, to lead more people through the smoke and back out to the other side. Then it’s a solid half hour of darkness, smoke, and people holding onto him for dear life; a half hour of passing Johnny on either side of the small tunnel; a half hour of hoping that the first responders on the other side appreciate his help enough not to rat him out for it. 

They’ve just gotten the last group of people out when there’s another seismic shift, and the tunnel starts to collapse. Peter feels it before he sees it — a piece of rubble overhead, coming straight down. He acts on instinct, shoving the man he’s leading out forward and out of the tunnel, bracing himself to jump but already knowing that when he does it will be too late. 

“ _ Ghost! _ ” 

It comes down on him, but not half as hard as it should — a flash of light illuminates the tunnel, and Peter realizes that Johnny has used a ball of flame to break it up before it hits. In the end it knocks him to the ground, but only pins him down by his arm. 

Johnny’s at his side within the second, shoving it off of him before Peter can even register the pain. 

“Are you — ”

“Fine,” says Peter, pulling his arm back into his side and trying to ignore the sharp throb of it. “Thanks.” 

Johnny looks disbelieving. “Your arm …” 

Peter follows Johnny gaze to his wrist, which is admittedly at a less-than-ideal angle. But the thing that jars him isn’t his wrist, but what’s missing from it: Tony’s sensor is gone. 

He glances down at the rubble, and sees it crushed, and split so fully in two that it slid right off of him. The wiring crackles, no doubt illuminating the panic in Peter’s face. He grabs for it and shoves it into his pocket. 

“Who all is down there?” calls a voice. 

They both recognize it immediately — the head of the NYPD. Peter stiffens. He’s not trapped, necessarily. He’ll get out of here unscathed. But there’s no way in hell he’ll get out of here unnoticed. 

When he glances up, though, Johnny’s already way ahead of him. “Go,” he says. “I got this.” 

Peter starts to shake his head, but Johnny doesn’t even let him lift it. 

“ _ Go _ .” 

Peter doesn’t have any options as it is, so he does just that — tears off into the tunnel, fully aware of the danger on the other side. But just as he clears it, there’s a plume of unfiltered, unfathomable light that shoots from the tunnel, so temporarily blinding that every person on the other side is squinting into nothing. Peter glances back over his shoulder, only able to see it because of his heightened sight: Johnny Storm, blazing like a star, filling up every corner of the world just so Peter can find his place in it. 

The image burns into his eyes, first from the light of it, and then from something else — something that tangles its way into Peter’s dreams, that warms the harsh cold of his perch by the river, where he sleeps soundly for the first time that year.  

* * *

 

Working for Reed … it’s a dream.

There are no set hours. Peter comes and goes as he pleases, and says exactly what he wants when he does. There is no worry of upsetting Reed, no boundary of hero worship the way there was with Tony; Peter speaks freely, sometimes  _ often _ , and without hesitating. He never worries about being wrong, because Reed doesn’t, either. 

They spitball on each other’s ideas — the good, the bad, the ugly — and within the first few weeks, there is a shine on those ideas. Physical things Peter can touch with his hands, and attribute to their work: a patent for cement that absorbs energy, and pulses it back into the city. New computer programs that can spin into city-wide emergency protocols that better assess specific types of danger, and warn the NYPD and EMT response units how to respond. Fabric that doesn’t just accommodate the Fantastic Four’s abilities, but enhances them — a suit that supercharges the flames that make Johnny fly, so he’s even faster; a suit that is more flexible than Reed himself; another that is so tear-resistant, Ben can’t rip it when he actively tries; one for Sue with the invisibility factor improved that is so comfortable that she almost forgets to take it off, like it’s a second skin. 

And then, in the periphery, the others: Sue, who ruffles his hair and tells him to go to bed earlier when he’s looking worse for wear. Ben, who tells him his hair looks dumb after Sue ruffles it, but always cooks extra on the days Peter is there, and sometimes even on the days he isn’t.

Johnny, who is close even when he isn’t, with that unique, uncanny ability to sneak up on Peter that nobody else has.  

“Hey,” he says, sliding into the workshop one afternoon and tossing Peter an apple. Peter catches it without looking; Johnny thinks it’s a fun party trick. “Got anything to do after Reed releases you from his nerdy clutches?” 

“Not really,” Peter says, wondering why Johnny’s asking. Usually Peter just sticks around for an hour or so to do homework or hang out with Johnny without anybody planning for it. He feels self-conscious, suddenly — like maybe this is Johnny’s way of saying they  _ should _ work it out in advance, so Peter takes the hint and leaves the times they don’t — but then when he glances over at Johnny, he sees something shifty in his expression. Something nervous and earnest that makes Peter almost forget that he is holding a lit blowtorch in his hands. 

“If you have the time — do you think — maybe …” 

Peter feels this unhelpful  _ whoosh _ of something, and it’s under him or through him or maybe just blowing between his ears, but whatever it is, it is concentrated on one stupid, nonsense thought: he thinks, for a moment, that Johnny might be trying to ask him out. 

“Yeah,” Peter blurts, before Johnny can finish the sentence. Before Peter can even think about the massive, bottomless pit of problems that would invite into his already objectively fucked up life. 

Johnny laughs. “You don’t even know what I’m gonna ask yet, man. And it’s like — totally fine if you say no, cuz it’s not your job at all, and — well, we’d probably have to — keep it on the DL.”

“What is it?” 

Johnny leans against one of the consoles Reed is always asking him not to lean against, rapping his knuckles on it a few times before asking, “Maybe — do you think we could … design a suit for Ghost to use?”

It’s weird, how the disappointment hits first — how strangely open it makes him — and how quickly the alarm fills him back up. 

“Ghost?” he asks, wondering if he’s allowed to play dumb, even though the name is plastered on every other page of the  _ New York Post _ and has been intermittently trending on Twitter since Johnny coined it a few months back. 

Johnny nods, and Peter stays very still. He wishes he could go back in time, the same way he always does, only this time just a few moments back. Because if Johnny betrays Ghost right now — if Johnny outs Spider-Man to him, Andrew, some civilian nobody who supposedly has nothing to do with any of the rhythms of New York’s would-be heroes — he doesn’t think he’ll ever fully recover from it. 

“Just, uh — that guy from the news.” Johnny shrugs. “Sometimes he’s out on the field and — I mean, he’s got his shit together, I don’t think it’d have to be fancy, but maybe we could make him something, too.” 

Peter’s still holding his breath. Waiting for Johnny to see his indecision, and try to preempt it. Waiting for Johnny to say the one thing Peter can’t forgive:  _ He’s not just any old vigilante. He’s Spider-Man _ .

Instead, Johnny says, “The only thing is … I don’t think we could tell Reed.” 

Peter has seen too much to let himself feel relief, but some cousin of it trickles into his veins, releases some of the air in his lungs. He forces himself to smile, grabbing some of the scraps of the fabric abandoned from one of the attempts at the finalized one for Johnny. 

“Tell Reed what?” 

Johnny’s face cracks into another one of those infectious smiles, and then the one Peter forced is anything but. He wraps an arm around Peter’s back, clamping his grip on his shoulder and pulling him in for a squeeze. Peter miserably tries not to think about the heat of Johnny’s fingers on his bare skin, the piney, almost burnt smell of him, the way their bodies fit so well that it feels stranger to separate than it does to bring them together. 

Like he has with a lot of things lately, he fails. 

* * *

 

The next time Peter ducks out of the aftermath of a battle, he finds a suit on a nearby rooftop, folded with a note in Johnny’s handwriting:  _ A new pair of oven mitts.  _

The smile doesn’t even have a chance to curl on his lips before it’s interrupted: “Nice kicks.” 

He should be scared, or angry, even, but when he whips around to face Natasha the relief must be seared across his face — her own softens at the sight of it, and she lets out a sigh. 

“Where have you — ”

“Taking care of things,” she says, cocking her head downtown — in the direction of where Peter was poisoned a few weeks back.

“Who …” 

“They won’t bother you again.” 

Peter frowns at her abruptness — then understands that whatever reason she has to be here, that isn’t it. Sure enough, she takes a step forward, her face finally catching the weak yellow light from the rooftop’s exit. There’s an urgency in it that catches Peter even further off guard than the fact of her presence already has. 

“I’m not in touch with Stark. But I have my own way of knowing things.”  

Peter’s fingers tighten into fists. This is it, then. Tony can’t even come and chew Peter out for breaking the sensor himself. 

“He thinks something happened to you,” says Natasha. Then, with her usual bluntness: “He thinks you’re dead.” 

Peter’s brows lift in surprise. And then he realizes: the sensor is defunct. He walks around with in a hoodie or fully masked, so even the facial recognition software the sensor was scrambling wouldn’t be able to detect him from cameras on the street. He has officially come full circle, taken Johnny’s nickname for him and breathed it into a truth: he’s become a ghost. 

There’s a question in Natasha’s eyes, and they both know the consequences of it. If Peter lets Tony know he’s alive, he has to let him know the rest of it: what he’s doing. Where he’s been. Who he’s lost. 

For a moment he isn’t on this roof at all, but back in that alley, tears streaming down his face, a phone pressed to his ear, calling, calling, calling. Standing at the fresh grave of his aunt, buried in between Ben Parker and Peter Parker, buried a rock’s throw away from his parents. Eating out of trash cans. Sleeping in the freezing rain. Alive only because the cavern of his guilt was wider than the part of him that wanted to die. 

The life he has now isn’t much, but he’s endured too much to give it up now. The classes. The internship. Ghost. All of it half-versions of the life he was supposed to lead, but more than he ever thought he’d have; enough that he knows he can’t live without it. 

Now Tony Stark isn’t the person who saves him. Now Tony Stark is the person with the power to take all of that away. 

His fists tighten. His eyes lock on Natasha’s. He takes the kind of breath he can’t take back. 

“Let him.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *wheezes in deadline*
> 
> merry christmas, y'all.


	6. Chapter 6

“You look like a dementor.”

“Ha ha.”

“Like some punk about to rob a convenience store with a water gun.”

“I’m _cold_.”

“Little Dweeb Riding Hood — _oof_.”

Peter nudges his elbow into Johnny’s side a second time for good measure. “I’m not _that_ short.”

Johnny tilts his head at him. “Aw. Did I make the shih tzu mad?”

Peter’s jaw drops. Johnny cocks an unapologetic eyebrow at him, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets and taking an exaggeratedly casual few strides away from him.

“You’re gonna pay for that,” says Peter, so fully forgetting himself that he finds himself starting to mirror Johnny’s smirk.

Johnny turns his back to Peter, a teasing glint in his eye. “Unlike you, fully-employed paid intern, I don’t have any money to — ”

_Thunk._

Johnny rounds on Peter, aghast, the slushy snowball Peter threw now sliding off his back and onto the pavement.

“Oh, you’re in for it now, Obi-Wan — ”

Peter uses Johnny’s momentary shock to his advantage, scooping up another snowball and chucking it, feeling something warm and wide swell in his chest. It’s not enough to make him forget himself — not enough that he’d ever let the hood Johnny’s making fun of him for slide down and expose his face — but enough to make him remember.

Johnny starts running after him, and Peter takes off, and for once when the snowy air fills up his lungs it’s with a thrill instead of dread. He turns, hearing Johnny splutter in confusion, and sees him crouching by a snow pile with his hands dripping water and a look of utter bewilderment on his face.

“Oh my god. You’re too hot to make a _snowball?_ ”

Johnny’s stares at him with the shock of someone whose hands are dripping blood, not water. “This is not a laughing matter, Andy! This is a crime of nature!”

“Bet you’re wishing you’d kept the receipt for those superpowers now, huh?” says Peter, packing another snowball and taking aim.

“Oh, shit, right! My superpowers,” says Johnny with a grin — and then, from the palm of his hand, he ignites a tiny fireball so small and so subtle that it kills Peter’s snowball with a little _poof_ in midair.

Peter’s jaw drops. “That’s cheating.”

Johnny cackles. “Don’t start a war you can’t finish, short stuff.”

Johnny’s advancing on him, and Peter starts to laugh, certain at any moment that he’s going to stop short before he barrels into Peter. But then, before Peter can react, he does just that — runs up at Peter and all but shoves him into a snowbank. Peter reacts on instinct, grabbing at Johnny’s coat and dragging him down with him, the two of them both yelping as they go down.

Johnny lands with a thud, laughing into his face, the full weight of him pressed into Peter. And then comes this sideways, slippery, beautiful moment when Peter really _does_ forget — a moment when Peter is just a boy, staring up at another boy, hoping he’s not imagining the sudden racing of that other boy’s heart against his.

“Seriously, dude,” says Johnny, shifting some of his weight off of Peter and settling himself into the snowbank next to him. Before the disappointment can touch him, Johnny leans back in and unceremoniously places both of his hands on Peter’s ears, warming them up with his unnatural internal heat. “You’re a walking ice block. Invest in a hat.”

Peter opens his mouth with another snappy comeback that melts on the tip of his tongue, right along with the tips of his ears, burning under Johnny’s touch. He’s so close that anyone passing them in the park right now would assume they were a couple, would assume that one of them was leaning in with the expectation of a kiss.

He wonders who will pull away first. Peter, because he has to, or Johnny, because he just plain doesn’t see Peter as more than whatever it is they have.

It ends up being neither of them, in the end, but instead a call from Reed — Peter only knows because it sings in Johnny’s pocket to the tune of the theme song from _Gumby._ Johnny sighs, taking his hands off Peter’s ears to answer it, then ending the conversation with a, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll be right here.”

Peter raises his eyebrows. “We?”

“Reed figured you were around. He needs your help with something, if you’re interested in overtime.”

The truth is, over the past few weeks, Peter is at the Baxter Building so often that he’s not sure where the internship ends and his informally living there begins. He doesn’t stay the night ever, of course, but he’s there before classes, when Reed is at is most productive, and after classes, when Reed is at his most manic, and then usually after dinner, doing homework with Johnny or playing video games with Johnny or talking about the future with Johnny or trying very, very hard to ignore the now impossible-to-ignore crush that he has on Johnny, which makes him feel a little bit more pathetic with every passing day.

That self-awareness of his spiral does nothing, unfortunately, to pull him out of it. He’s fallen for Johnny the way that lobsters get lulled into complacency before being cooked alive: plopped into water that started to boil around him before he knew any better than to try to escape it.

Minus the part where he’s not entirely sure whether he’s miserable or delighted to be a part of his own gradual but inevitable murder.

Because there’s no way this ends well for him. He is shuffling alongside Johnny in the slush, watching Johnny summon an Uber, but also watching him a year, ten years, a lifetime down the line — and no matter what he sees, he knows that there is no room for Peter. No room for his lies, or his secret life. No room for anything at all, really, because as far as Peter can tell, Johnny’s not even interested.

Or maybe he is. Trouble being, he’s more interested in _Ghost_ than one Andrew Summers.

Not that Johnny says anything about it himself. Aside from making the suit — flame-proof, tear-resistant, insulated, and jet black, among other insightful additions Johnny thought up himself — he’s never once mentioned Ghost again. But Sue and Reed poke fun at his “crush” enough that Peter knows Johnny must talk about it when he’s not around. And even if he didn’t, every gossip rag, BuzzFeed article, and locker room the world over has started rumors about the two of them being an _item_.

It’s exactly why Peter has done his best to lay lower than ever, and avoid Johnny as Ghost at all costs. The teasing from his teammates aside, Peter knows it’s only a matter of time before Johnny gets called in by Ross to ask about Ghost, if he hasn’t already. And that’s one particular danger Johnny can’t even fathom the extent of yet.

So Peter will fathom it for him. The bubble Johnny is protected under may be an evil one, but it still isn’t one that Peter is willing to pop.

“Richards, I’m not warning you. I’m _telling_ you.”

Peter freezes in the doorway of the penthouse.

“Oh, man,” says Johnny, rolling his eyes at Peter conspiratorially. “If that’s who I think it is, you’re about to lose your all your geek shit and then some.”

Peter ignores him, every cell in his ears screaming to attention.

He knows that voice.

“I don’t — what’s — I don’t report to you,” Reed answers. They’re in the lab with the door open, their voices echoing out into the hall. “I mean — not that I don’t agree with you, because a part of me does, but — I mean, you try stopping Johnny.”

“This isn’t a matter of try. You do it or you don’t, and if you don’t — ”

“Tony.” It’s Sue’s voice now, placating, but firm. “Why don’t you sit down? You look … you seem unwell.”

Peter can’t breathe. He reaches for his wrist, tightening his fingers around the spot where the sensor used to be; where something would have warned him he was walking straight into Tony, straight into his own nightmare.

“I always seem unwell, it’s my schtick. But you’re not listening to me.”

At this point Johnny and Peter are both rooted to the spot, understanding both that nobody heard them come in, and that they are very much not meant to be hearing whatever is going on in the other room. Johnny glances over at Peter, who stares back at him helplessly, sinking into a private shame.

There’s a moment when they’re both deciding what to do — whether to slink back out, or continue to eavesdrop — when Johnny makes the decision for them both, by leaning against the wall.

“Did something happen?” Reed asks.

Tony’s voice is so low that of the two of them, only Peter can hear it; the moment he does, he wishes he couldn’t.

“I — lost someone.”  

There’s a beat of silence, but to Peter it seems to last forever. To Peter it seems like some kind of edge he is leaning over, tilting, falling, waiting for the moment some reflex kicks in and he bursts into the lab: _I’m sorry, Mr. Stark. I’m sorry —_

“We all lost people,” says Sue, softly.

Johnny blinks, hard. There is a hurt so deep but so immediate in his expression that Peter understands with a brutal kind of empathy how close to the surface it must be, how actively Johnny must be walking around in the world and swallowing it down.

“No. I  — he shouldn’t have fucking been there at all. These kids, they’ve got no place on the battlefield.” Tony’s voice is tight, thick in a way that Peter has never heard it before. “They’ve got no place cleaning up our shit. The consequences … ”

“Johnny is well aware.”

“No, he’s fucking not.” There’s a hardness in the words that chills them both. “And even if he does, it’s not — they’re too — ”

“What do you mean,  _they?_ ”

“Reed,” says Sue lowly — a warning. The answer is already slicing the air, cutting even from their safe distance away. Peter can hear Reed rock back on his heels, feel the low, rueful breath out of Sue’s chest. He listens for Tony and hears nothing but the rush of his blood.

Peter grabs Johnny by the elbow, his eyes on the front door. _Can we go?_

Johnny answers by turning around and walking out, without so much as cocking his head for Peter to follow. Peter does anyway, but Johnny suddenly feels so faraway that Peter has a sense that even if he reached out for Johnny’s elbow again, he would stumble into thin air.

Johnny doesn’t just hit the down arrow on the elevator. He slams it hard enough that it jams, hard enough that Peter flinches. Hard enough that Peter takes a step forward, putting himself into space that Johnny clearly isn’t expecting him to fill.

“Johnny.”

Johnny turns away abruptly, with a heat more searing and more sharp than any that he could conjure on his own. Then he stops short, in some anguished, hesitant in between that Peter recognizes all too well: the moment between holding yourself together and letting yourself fall apart.

He understands that if he lets Johnny fall apart now, it will open a door that can’t be shut again. It will bring them one step closer to something Peter has tried to avoid since the beginning, not for his own safety, but for Johnny’s. But he can feel Johnny’s pain so viscerally that he can’t separate it from his own; feels it so personally that it feels as if it is a pain he has always known, or has been waiting to know all his life.

It feels like it is his, but not in that it happened to him; in that it’s a burden he is suddenly compelled to share.

The elevator doors open. Johnny moves to step inside.

“Johnny,” he says again.

And Johnny stops. Turns to Peter, his cheeks red, his eyes rimmed — and Peter sees there wasn’t a moment where Johnny was deciding whether or not to fall apart, but a moment where Johnny was deciding whether or not to let Peter know he already had.

“He can’t fucking — he can’t _take_ this from me.”

Johnny’s angry, but he’s not. Peter can see what’s really there, brewing just under it — the desperation. The misplaced guilt. His own torment, reflected back at him, so suddenly that it feels like being blinded by the sun.

“He won’t,” says Peter.

“You heard him. You _heard_ him,” says Johnny, pacing up the hall, but ignoring the open elevator doors. “ _Fuck_. I knew Stark hated me — ever since the beginning, he’s — ”

“He doesn’t hate you,” says Peter, the words sticking in his throat. “He just wants you to be safe.”

The words leave his own mouth like whiplash — the sudden, unbearable understanding that he doesn’t want to reconcile. And with it, the guilt that pierces through everything else, sharper than it has ever been before. Like a hundred tiny knives, all of them with Tony’s voice: _I lost someone._

“ _Fuck_ being safe.” Johnny emphasizes it with a fist careening into the wall. Peter half-expects the plaster to crumble, but then remembers that Johnny doesn’t have enhanced strength. That in some ways, he is awfully, ridiculously vulnerable in a way that Peter never will be again, in a way that suddenly terrifies Peter — how breakable Johnny really is. “And fuck Tony Stark, if he thinks for one fucking _second_ he can take me out of this team.”

Johnny is shaking then, his fists held at his sides. Peter recognizes that Johnny is holding back, trying not to scare him, at the same time that he recognizes that there is nothing Johnny could ever do or say to scare him — that he’s come too close to his core to do anything but gravitate around it, no matter how heavy.

He takes a step forward, so close that he can feel the heat of Johnny’s uneven breaths. “Your sister said you lost someone.”

Johnny scrunches his eyes shut. “Yeah.”

“During … from Thanos?”

Johnny blows a breath that seems to take weight from him, make him flimsy. He leans closer to Peter, the word stuck in his throat: “Yeah.”

“But you … I thought …”

He’s not trying to pry, but Johnny answers anyway, his head hung low. “The powers — they happened during Thanos. Some fucked up radiation while we were all up in the space station.”

Peter shakes his head. “You don’t have to — ”

“No. I want to tell you. I want — someone to know.”

 _Someone_ , he says. The word leaves some kind of bitter aftertaste, until Johnny clarifies: “I want you to know.”

Only then does Peter nod, so carefully that he doesn’t realize he’s come so close and Johnny’s leaned in so low that their foreheads are almost touching.

“Our mom — well — she died when we were young. And our dad … he — got mixed up with the wrong crowd. Went to prison. And before Sue and I could do anything to get him out — Thanos. The attack. It … the prison was destroyed.”

“And your dad …”

Johnny nods, his eyes grim and gray and set on Peter’s. The air is suddenly so still between them that Peter has all but forgotten what is on the other side of the door.

“I’m sorry,” Peter breathes. “Johnny, I’m so sorry.”

Johnny sucks in air like he’s going to dismiss the whole thing. Then his eyes connect with Peter’s again, and there is something too immediate, too sharp for either one of them to pretend to be anything other than what they are.

“I gotta — I gotta be a part of this.” Johnny’s voice is thick, bordering on tears. “I gotta do _something_ , because I — I should have gotten him out of there, and I — ”

Johnny isn’t tilting, is just as steady on his feet as ever, but the moment Peter leans fully in Johnny seems to take it as permission to finally let himself sink into someone else’s hold. And that is exactly what Peter does: holds him there, through the shuddering breaths, through every muscle in Johnny’s body going rigid and alternately going limp. It is easy, because Peter is strong; but mostly it is easy, because it is the kind of pain Peter knows so well that he can’t remember a time he ever lived without it.

“It’s not your fault,” says Peter. He knows to say it because it’s what he has always wanted to hear. It’s what Ben said to him when his parents died; what May said to him when Ben died; what he needed Tony to say, when there was nobody else left to say it. “You can only do what you can. And you are. Every day.”

Johnny shakes his head into Peter’s shoulder, trying not to let the words count, but Peter just holds him even tighter until he has no choice but to hear them, to let them take hold.

Peter doesn’t know how much time passes. His eyes close, his heart slows; there is only this. The warmth and the pain and the heaviness that suddenly doesn’t seem as heavy as it should, shared between the two of them. He can almost imagine, for a moment, that Johnny already knows the truth. That he’s never been able to hide anything from Johnny, because they came into each other’s worlds already knowing all there is to know.

Any maybe, in some ways, they do; because when Johnny finally does take in a resolute breath and pry himself out of Peter’s arms, he says, “But you ... you already get it.”

Peter doesn’t answer for a moment, unsure what to say. Unwilling to break whatever spell has come over them, especially in this moment when he knows Johnny needs him, and he wants to be a person Johnny can need. 

Johnny tilts his head toward the window, toward the city. “You’re on your own.”

Peter ducks his head down too fast to play it off; it feels like the words have sliced in some thin place between his ribs.

“I’m … I’m not …”

He is, though, isn’t he? There is Natasha, but there also isn’t. There is Johnny, but Peter lies to him every day.  There is … there is …

“You don’t have a phone, Andy.”

Peter looks up at him, blinking hard. Johnny’s smile is wet and rueful.

“People who don’t have phones — it’s because they don’t have anybody checking on them.”

Peter’s eyes sting so fast that there’s almost no time to blink it away. And then Johnny’s hand is on his cheek, steadying it there, so he can’t look down and hide.

“I know Reed’s been trying to hawk one of those stupid Stark Phones on you. You should take it.”

Peter shakes his head. “I don’t — I don’t need …”

“I want check in on you.” The words are quiet, but firm. “Take the phone so I can do that. Okay?”

Peter stares up at him, bewildered and overwhelmed but somehow more at peace with it than he should be; like he has been weathering the same storm for a decade now, and only just managed to stumble into the eye of it. That eye is sarcastic, and compulsive, and unbearably green; he represents so many things that Peter should hate. But Peter has lived the kind of life where he doesn’t get to make choices, and maybe Johnny is just one more thing that is decided for him. He couldn’t not love him if he tried.

“Okay,” says Peter.

And then the elevator door opens, and MJ walks in, and she punches him in the face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i PROMISE there is irondad in the next chapter; some things had to be established first. i mean there is some irondad here, but like, not the aggressive irondad i am known for, and i promise i will deliver, come 2019. (and y'all know that when i deliver i do it in the Worst Way, so ... brace urselves.) 
> 
> thank you guys infinitely for your kind words and for continuing to read my nonsense. 2018 has been joyous and terrifying and sometimes quite awful, as i imagine most of your 2018s have been. but i get to cheat any awfulness by being on here with all of you. thank you for your patience and your kindness and your words. i have a second book to write next year that i am contracted for — just typing that alone makes me want to cry with gratitude! — so things will probably be slow-moving, but i promise i'm not going anywhere. this is my writing home. thank you for filling it with love <3.


	7. Chapter 7

“MJ! What the hell!” 

MJ coolly uncocks her fist and puts her arm back down at her side, staring at Peter with an expression that would look indifferent if he weren’t close enough to see the blaze in her eyes. 

“Whoops,” she deadpans. “I thought you were someone else.” 

Peter blinks, his cheek throbbing, his heart clamoring. He opens his mouth, ready to plead, ready to beg her not to expose him, but just seeing her standing there sucks all of the words right out of him. 

He’s missed her. He’s missed her so fucking  _ much _ . Enough that he almost hopes that she does rat him out, because even if she’s furious, even if she puts him through hell for this, at least she’ll be close when she’s doing it. For a selfish moment, he’d rather have MJ poised to throttle him than have no MJ at all. 

Johnny, of course, misses all of this wordless exchange, gaping at MJ incredulously. “So you punched him in the  _ face? _ ”

“I thought he was someone who  _ lied _ to me.” 

“Again, uh, it’s the spontaneous face-punching thing i’m a little stuck on here — like, is that something you just  _ do _ sometimes, or — ”

“I should go,” says Peter. 

MJ sticks her arm in the elevator doors, punching it back open before it can close. “Allow me.” 

Johnny’s mouth is wide open with the kind of fear that only MJ can inspire. Peter pauses for a moment — he really should leave. Tony is just a few walls away, and the longer he stands out here, the likelier it is that he or MJ is going to say something to further blow his cover. 

So he walks into the elevator. Turns to mumble some excuse of a goodbye to Johnny, and try to communicate the kind of apology to MJ that no amount of meaningful glances or even words ever will. But MJ isn’t there anymore — she’s getting in the elevator with him. 

“Wait — didn’t you just — MJ, you just got here,” Johnny bleats. 

“Sure did.”

“But aren’t you — “

MJ slams the button to close the elevator doors with enough force to shake the whole thing. The doors slide closed and Johnny disappears, and the elevator starts its smooth descent down. 

That is, until MJ shoves another button and it lurches to a stop.  

“I thought you were  _ dead _ .” 

Her back is turned to him. She’s shaking. Or maybe it’s just him. He knows that he’s the one who was supposed to be dead, but in a way, to him, everyone else was — in a way, she is more like a ghost than he is, some remnant of his past life that he has tried to bury that’s ripped its way to the surface so violently and so fast that he is almost too stunned to speak. 

“I’m sorry. After Thanos — people were after me, so Tony said I had to — ”

“No, you stupid  _ fuck _ , the  _ second _ time.” 

“The second time.” 

She flinches like she’s going to turn around and look at him, but stops herself. Instead she slams another button, and the elevator starts to move. 

“I  _ saw _ you. I saw you here, trying to sneak past me,  _ weeks _ ago.”

Peter’s jaw drops. “You …” 

“I went to your fucking funeral, that first time. I buried you. I — I didn’t —  _ fuck _ you,” she says, finally turning around. Her eyes are streaming, her face contorted. She only has an inch on him, but in that moment her anguish is enough to swallow him whole.  “Do you even know — I mean, fuck, Peter. I loved you. You were one of my best  _ friends _ , and — and then you were  _ dead _ , and then you — what the  _ fuck _ do you think you’re doing?” 

Peter leans forward and presses the button to stop the elevator again. MJ’s tears are fueled by the kind of rage that seems ten times bigger than she is, but Peter’s are quiet and solemn; the two of them stare at each other, fire and ice, pain on pain, the same polar opposite and identical core they have always been. 

They give way to each other then, something between them cracking, reducing them to their most bare selves. 

“I quit the internship, because of you. Because I knew if you put us through what you did that — that you didn’t have a choice.” Half of it is whispered, half of it growled, like she can’t settle on her anger or her despair. “I went over to Stark to help people, and because — I figured if anyone had anything on you, it was him.”  

Peter looks down at his feet. At his beat-up shoes held together at the bottoms with duct tape he stole from the inside of a professor’s desk. At his threadbare, third-hand jeans and the toes that are still numb from the cold even after all this time being out of it. 

“Stark doesn’t have anything on me. He couldn’t.” He is not proud of the bitterness of the words, especially after all the resources Tony poured into him, but that doesn’t make it any less true: “He doesn’t care.” 

MJ gapes at him. “If you think that’s true you’re delusional. Ned hacked his files — ”

“ _ Ned _ knows about this?” 

“Of fucking  _ course _ Ned knows about this, and fuck you again for asking,” she says. “He deserved to know you weren’t dead every bit as much as I did.” 

“I never wanted to — ”

“I know, I  _ know. _ We both  _ know _ , and it’s terrible, and you — you look  _ terrible _ , by the way,” she says, taking another step toward him, taking him in. “It’s making it really hard to be mad at you.”  

“No. Be mad at me. What I put you through — ”

“No, Jesus, don’t  _ help _ me be mad at you, you — ” She cuts herself off, and there is almost a sliver of a smile through her tears, almost a hint of that old exasperation she saved exclusively for him. Then she pulls it back in with a single breath, and says, “Ned broke through the encryptions. Found out what Tony had done. And — it killed us, but — we decided to leave it be. At least for a little while. Until this fuck-all with Ross died down.” 

MJ knows about Ross. Peter supposes he shouldn’t be surprised at this point in the conversation, and maybe surprise is the wrong word — terrified is the right one. Because if MJ knows about Ross, there’s almost no chance that Ross doesn’t know about MJ. And if this compromises her and Ned in some way, then really, what was all of this for? If he can’t keep the people he loves safe, why did he bother with all of the lies in the first place? God knows it wasn’t for him. He’d fork himself over in a heartbeat, if it weren’t for all the other people it might hurt. 

All the people it  _ did _ hurt. 

“But a few weeks ago Stark just went AWOL. Like, full off the grid, not a trace. Even Pepper couldn’t find him.” 

Peter blinks, wondering why she is telling him this. 

“He thinks you’re dead, Peter. And apparently he was ripping Manhattan apart to find you.” She takes a leveling breath. “I guess he never did. Because now he thinks  _ Andrew Summers _ was killed in some — some fucking explosion in midtown, playing hero.” 

Peter doesn’t know why he confesses. Maybe because he’s never been able to be anything but honest, under MJ’s gaze. 

“I was there,” he says. “I was …” 

“Of course you were. You can’t help yourself.” 

He doesn’t mean to try to lighten the mood, not with everything still so heavy and uncertain between them, but he can’t help himself: “Look who’s talking.” 

This earns him half of a begrudging smirk, but it dies almost as soon as it comes. 

“We really thought you were gone this time.” The words come out in a breath, the kind of hush that is all the more unsettling because it’s MJ, who is subtle, and cutting, but anything but quiet. “Ned and I tried everything. We couldn’t even find your aunt — ”

Something must give him away, too fast, too viscerally for him to pull it back. 

“Peter?” 

He leans forward to press the button that makes the elevator move. MJ’s too quick for him though, grabbing his hand. 

“Peter …” 

“I don’t — shit. Can we — ”

It feels like the elevator is closing in on him. Like he is going to fill this tiny space with his grief, with everything he has tried and failed to swallow down in the past few years, and when it explodes it will destroy everything in its path. 

“Just breathe, okay? Everything’s okay. It’s just me. It’s just — ”

“May’s dead.” Peter scrunches his eyes shut. It feels like the air is screaming, like maybe it was supposed to stop when he finally said it out loud, but it won’t. Everything is just as awful, just as much his fault. “She — it was a brain aneurysm, but — what are the odds? What are they, really? Someone wanted her dead, because of me, because I — because I …” 

“Peter, Peter, stop. Hold on. What are you — ”

He tears out of her grasp and hits the elevator button. She doesn’t try to stop him this time. 

“I shouldn’t have stayed here.” 

“Where even  _ are _ you staying?” 

“I shouldn’t — oh, God.”

It’s his fault it’s his fault it’s his fault. Why is it only just occurring to him  _ now?  _ He should have connected the dots weeks ago. Someone knew he was alive. Someone tried to kill him, and before they did it, they said his name. The name he shares with one May Parker. 

Her death wasn’t an accident. Nothing is an accident. Everything terrible that happens has one common denominator, and it’s  _ him _ . 

He’s already mentally mapped out a route to the 33rd Street station, to the PATH train that will take him to New Jersey, to a Greyhound he can catch in any direction, it doesn’t matter which, just far, far, far from here and anybody who knows him, anybody else who could get hurt. 

That device breaking wasn’t a mistake. It was a godsend. The universe trying to give him a chance to keep people safe. 

He’s not going to blow it. 

“Just — I’ll go, okay? I’ll leave, and you can’t tell Tony or Ned or anyone else, because then they’ll get killed too, and I can’t — I  _ can’t _ .”

MJ yanks him by the arm, none too gently. Her eyes are so fierce that he finally feels the full brunt of her pain, her grief, everything so fully and unapologetically coming to the surface of her that it knocks Peter off of his. 

“Peter, I just got you back. If you think there’s any way in hell — ”

The elevator doors open and Peter shakes her off and tears out of them, into the lobby of the Baxter Building, MJ hot on his heels. 

“Please, Peter, we can — ”

They both blink up then, at a too-large shadow that crosses over the street, followed by gasps and pointing from people all around them. It’s Johnny, fully flamed and flying through the sky with the kind of urgency that Peter immediately knows there’s something wrong — not wrong with Johnny, but  _ wrong _ . 

Within seconds he can see the helicopter perched on the top of the Baxter Building taking off, presumably with Reed and Sue inside. He’s not sure where Ben is, but he knows he must be headed in the same direction — south, further downtown, where Peter can close his eyes and suddenly hear the convergence of at least a dozen sirens, maybe more. 

When he turns back to look at MJ, the grief is gone, replaced with something scarier. 

“I will never stop looking for you," she says. "Do you hear me? If you don’t come back — if you try to hide — I will never,  _ ever _ stop looking.”

It’s not a threat, he understands. It’s a promise. She doesn’t want him to know to scare him; she wants him to know so it is seared into his conscience, so he will change his mind. 

What MJ never counts on is that he’d rather her be alive and furious than dead. 

* * *

He’s not going into this fight the right way. It’s not recklessness, not even thoughtlessness — it’s something deeper than that, something so innate and bottomless that it numbs him. He doesn’t particularly care if he lives or dies, and it immediately affects everything. His choices and the timing of them, the risks and the extent of them; it’s like it’s happening to someone else, like a video game, like this could end with him splattered on the pavement or breathing another day and it wouldn’t matter much more than the quarter it cost him to play.

At one point, as the chaos finally begins to simmer down, he is exposed enough that Johnny not only spots him, but corners him. He flies at a speed that Peter didn’t think he could, only to pin Peter against the door of the roof he was about to fling himself off of. 

“The  _ fuck _ are you doing?” Johnny demands. 

If Peter thought Johnny was angry earlier, it’s nothing compared to this. It is enough to stir him, but not enough to change his mind; enough to wake him to the bite of his hurt, the ache of his longing, the regret for everything he will leave behind, but not enough to make any of it okay. 

“My job,” says Peter, gesturing out to the street, which is now crawling with fast-moving cylindrical robots that seem to have self-timed explosion mechanisms in them. Most of them are accounted for now, but Reed’s rounding them up and throwing them into the Hudson, Sue’s using her forcefield around bystanders, Ben’s absorbing the ones that are imminently exploding; Johnny’s flying people out of the way and bots into the sky. 

And Peter’s been in the middle of it all, alternating between pulling people out of the way and trying to find the overarching pattern to the bots’ explosions — he’s close. Would be closer, if Johnny weren’t pinning him against a wall, his eyes blazing and his grip on Peter’s shoulder so tight that the fabric is scrunching around his fingers. 

“No, you’re going full kamikaze. I’ve watched you nearly get yourself killed more times than I can — ”

“So what?” Peter demands, shrugging Johnny off. “Who the fuck cares if — ”

“Who  _ cares?  _ I do, you — you —  _ jerk _ ,” says Johnny. 

There’s a moment when the words hover there, and Peter wants to seize them, wants to give them weight and anchor them in his world. But nothing of Johnny’s was ever his to keep. 

“You don’t,” he says. Because he has to burn this bridge. Has to make Johnny hate him, so when this fight is over, and he disappears, Johnny won’t be looking for him, too. “You only think you do, in some fucked up way, maybe,” he goes on — and it’s not him he’s thinking about, but Andrew. The person he actually is now. The one Johnny  _ does _ know, but still would throw to the side for Spider-Man in an instant. It’s crawling up in him, dark, twisted,  _ bitter _ , so wretched that he can’t even appreciate the absurdity of being jealous of  _ himself _ . “But you don’t know me, you don’t have any idea what I — ”

“Peter.” 

Johnny says his name, and it is like he has cast some kind of spell. Peter stares at him, breathing hard, as Johnny blinks back his own incredulity at what he’s about to say. 

“Who on this  _ planet _ knows you better than I do?” 

And then Peter sees it, so fully and so plainly — he has always felt a connection to Johnny, but in all his resistance to it, has never let himself consider its core. These two teenagers, burdened with power that even their betters don’t know how to handle. These two orphans, raised by women who had to make room for them. These entire lives, spent growing up feeling more like apologies than boys. These two sets of terrified eyes, looking into twin hearts, beating the pain of the same ugly, beautiful things. 

Peter shuts his eyes behind the mask. It’s too much.

“Let me go.” 

Johnny’s grip only tightens on him, leaning in so close that Peter can feel the familiar heat of him. “Not a fucking chance.”

"Johnny — "

"I know what you're doing. I've been there, too. But this is  _not_ how this goes down. You hear me?"  

He doesn't want to — doesn't want to acknowledge his pain, let alone that Johnny shares it. Doesn't want to feel anything at all. 

Johnny tightens his grip, demanding an answer. "Do you?" 

Peter’s breath hitches, but it does nothing to stop him from what happens next. He lifts seam of his mask, exposing his chin, his mouth. He has been reckless in the last hour, but this is its fever pitch; this is the height of it, dizzy and senseless, too far up for the hesitation of the  _ before _ , or the consequences of the  _ after _ . 

Johnny watches, transfixed. He seems to know what’s going to happen before Peter does. Peter makes the choice, but it’s Johnny who closes his eyes, and then closes the distance between them — their mouths crush, and at first it is teeth and desperation and something close to anger, some struggle to fully absorb each other, to understand this mutual pain that somehow feels bigger when they push it together. 

And then, for a moment — just one sacred, untouchable moment — he is kissing Johnny Storm. His heart is swollen and his blood is made of fire and every nerve in is body is firing into some blissful infinity, into something that will outlive him, that will keep shining long after they're gone. 

“Fuck,” says Johnny, the instant it’s over. “You’re gonna leave, aren’t you?” 

Peter doesn’t think until that moment that he might cry. He doesn’t have the power to nod, to say anything really, but the silence says it for him. 

“Tell me what’s going on. I can help you. Peter, let me  _ help _ .” 

It splinters something in him — not his resolve. But something that makes him lean in, however briefly, and press his forehead into Johnny’s neck. Johnny lets him, wrapping an arm around Peter’s shoulders to pull him in, and there is some strange levity in this — this feeling not just of being comforted, but understood. This feeling of being known.

And then — 

“What in the knockoff Gossip Girl bullshit is  _ this? _ ” 

Peter’s the one who pulls away, not Johnny; Peter’s the one who recognizes Tony’s voice so immediately and viscerally that he knows there is hell to pay on the other end of it. And sure enough, there he is, hovering just above the rooftop in full Iron Man glory, making it apparent that a reckoning is about to come down. 

The faceplate lifts, and Peter’s legs turn into jelly. He takes a step, putting himself behind Johnny, but he’s not fast enough — he sees it. The gray pallor of Tony’s face. The red rim of his tired eyes. The blue, nearly bruised edges of them. This isn't Tony; this is something else, dug from some depth Peter knows the darkness of all too well. 

Before Johnny or Peter can say anything, Tony releases himself from the suit entirely, stepping onto the roof to level with them. He glares at Peter, and then back at Johnny, snapping, “Do you think this is a fucking ice cream social? One teenager was bad enough — ”

“Why do you even think he’s a — ”

“If the prince of darkness over here  _ isn’t _ a teenager, he has a hell of a lot more authorities than me to answer to, that’s for damn sure,” says Tony, more livid by the second. 

Neither Peter nor Johnny has anything to say to that. 

Tony turns to Peter. “What even are you? You know what, no — don’t answer that.  _ Go home _ . Jesus, get the hell out of here, before someone who actually has to do something about you gets ahold of you and makes your life a living nightmare.” 

Peter is frozen in place, his ears ringing, his eyes starting to sting. He takes a step forward.  _ It’s me, _ he wants to say.  _ I’m alive, and I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry at all _ . 

It’s everything, all at once: it’s hatred and hero worship, it’s fear and forgiveness, it’s love and it’s horrifying and he just wants to close his eyes and go back to a time when he thought that this broken man could keep his promises, could turn the world on its axis to keep Peter spinning on it the right way.

“Can he hear me through that goth getup?  _ Get out of here _ .” Tony grits his teeth, turning back to Johnny. “It’s bad enough that someone is targeting you — ”

This snaps Peter right out of his pity spiral. “Someone is  _ targeting  _ you?” he hisses.  

“ — the  _ last _ thing we need is another liability, especially wannabe Batman over here.” 

The blood rushes in Peter’s ears, but he keeps his voice low. “Who’s  _ targeting _ y — “

“Someone’s targeting all of us, it comes with the territory, Stark," says Johnny, drawing himself up to all six-foot-something of himself, towering over them both. "And last I checked, you’re not the boss of me.” 

Tony is unfazed. “Of all the infinite clichés at your disposal, kid, you went with  _ that _ one? Just because I’m not Daddy Ross — “

The words fade out and funnel into a sharp ring; Peter feels the oncoming danger so immediately and so viscerally that there is no room for any of his other senses. One of the bots has evidently climbed up to their level, and Peter can see its trajectory in his mind’s eye, like a horror reel of his own design: it’s about to pitch forward, barreling itself into Johnny, and push right through him into Tony. 

Not on his watch. 

A second is all he has, but it’s all he needs — Johnny is too distracted arguing to see Peter lunge, to stop him from knocking him to the ground in one calculated shove of his arm. Tony is distracted too, but Peter still sees the alarm and the understanding flash through his face in two excruciating beats, as Peter flings himself directly in front of him and into the bot’s path.

The explosion squares Peter directly in the chest. It knocks the air out of him, and then so much else — he hears screaming, feels pavement, and then mercifully, nothing at all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said more irondad in this chapter, but they keep getting away from me, there is just so much and I want to make the story count, ya know??? Please forgive. I have not slept for 36 hours. For good reasons, but also I am delirious (I swear I wrote this when there was sleep in my bones, just had to wait 'til I was on Wi-Fi again to write this NONSENSE AUTHOR'S NOTE and copy/paste the chapter text into this doc).
> 
> As always, bless y'all — between the full-time job and the other full-ish-time authoring gig and all of the extreeeemely dorky communities I am a part of outside of all of that, I have been v v v v busy, and your patience, feedback, and thoughtful commentary genuinely means the world to me. I'm hoping it'll be a bit faster once I wrap up some deadlines, and also because I have these next few chapters aggressively plotted in my head, so fingers crossed for speedy updates. 
> 
> For now, though, I sleeps. I sleeps for many moons. HERE'S TO MORE SLEEP IN 2019!!!!


	8. Chapter 8

His mask is still on when he comes to, opening his eyes to bright light and steady beeping and a dull ache in his chest. He recognizes the precise hum of the machinery, the way the sound echoes of these exact walls, well enough to know that he’s in the Stark medical facilities; he doesn’t quite recognize himself well enough to remember not to pull off his mask. 

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” 

Peter freezes, his hand on the seams of it. Not Spider-Man’s mask. Ghost’s. 

He blinks to the sound of Tony’s voice, on the other side of the room, leaning against the door. He has put as much space between himself and Peter as possible, but Peter can still see something brewing in his eyes, something deeper than the exhaustion and the grief. 

He opens his mouth, but Tony cuts him off again. 

“Trust me, Danny Phantom. It’s better for both of us if I don’t know.” 

The air poised in his throat seems to leak out of him. Peter stares, and Tony stares back, and there is a hardness in it, some kind of veneer that wasn’t there before; Tony was already a person who had seemed, in his own way, so inaccessible to Peter, but now it’s as if Tony has put up a barrier between himself and the world so thick that he’s not even fully a part of it anymore. 

Tony clears his throat, seeming momentarily unnerved by Peter’s gaze. 

“Here’s the deal, okay?” he says. “Once that healing factor of yours fully kicks in, you’re going to leave here. Then you’re going to stop this vigilante nonsense that’s putting a giant neon sign over your head. Because if you haven’t clued up already, this planet isn’t a safe place for people like you.” 

Peter doesn’t say anything, but tilts his head in question. Tony makes some kind of sharp poofing gesture with his hands that only seems to muddle him more. 

His voice is lower when he clarifies: “People whose DNA got bungled from that pulse from space. People like your Instagram ham of a boyfriend.” 

_ People _ . Plural. As in people beyond the Fantastic Four. It never even occurred to Peter that there were others — Johnny and the rest of the team were in space, so they seemed like anomalies. 

Or maybe Ross just wanted them to seem that way. 

“Well, if you didn’t know that’s how you ended up this way, now you do.” 

Jesus. How many others could there be? Enough that Tony just assumes based on one encounter that he’s one of them? The implications are staggering, building up in his head like heavy weights, crushing all the other questions, all the hurt that has seeped into every one of them and seized like too-tight threads. 

“There are people hunting you. Not to send you to jail. Not even to kill you.” Tony looks away from him. “The kinda shit that will make you wish they would.” 

Peter’s hands clench into fists. He already wishes it. Especially now, in this moment, when he wants more than anything to rip off this mask, to tell Tony the truth, but knows that he can’t — it’s not a matter of his own safety now. It’s a matter of Tony’s, too. Everyone around him. He’s a grenade, whether he’s Spider-Man, or Ghost, or merely breathing — he leaves a trail of death behind him. 

“Look — it’s clear you’re no rookie, but it’s also clear you’re a kid.” There’s a beat, then, when the hardness in Tony’s eyes lifts; when there is a shine in them that Peter knows he isn’t meant to see. “Go do dumb kid stuff with your friends. Go join your silly clubs, go on field trips, take stupid selfies, go … I don’t know. Be a kid.” 

He’s talking to Ghost, but he’s thinking of Peter. It’s there in his face, and the subtle twitch of the vein in his forehead that only Peter used to be capable of bringing out; it’s there in the gruffness of his words; it’s even there in the moment when he swallows, hard, and starts turning away. 

“Also — thanks,” he says. “For saving my life.” 

His hand’s on the door, ready to leave. Peter wants to scream. 

“Can I offer you a pro tip in exchange?” 

Peter doesn’t answer. He already knows what Tony is going to say, and his heart is already breaking for it. 

“Don’t ever do something that stupid again.” 

* * *

 

There are two things next to his bed: folded clothes, and a piece of paper with a phone number on it.  _ For emergencies, _ it reads, and then just underneath:  _ Don’t be a dick about it _ . 

He waits fifteen minutes after Tony leaves, and then makes himself disappear. 

It’s easy, because Tony made it easy. There’s nobody to sneak past, no vent to squeeze himself into, no walls to climb. He walks out the back door and into the dusk, a nameless boy in a teeming island, slipping back into its maelstrom so easily that it doesn’t have to make room for him, never bothered to swallow him in the time that he left. 

He walks up to Morningside Heights, the hood of the coat Tony left for him pulled up over his head, taking the least populated route he can find. The library on campus is still open. He sneaks into the back, where he’s hidden his books. For some reason, it’s important to him to have the books — the comforting weight of them in his arms, the knowledge in them tethering him to the concrete. They remind him of who he really is, under all these layers of bullshit. They remind him that there is something to define him other than fear. 

He lingers, just for a moment, outside of Pupin Hall; outside of the classroom where he first met Johnny a few months ago. It’s cold, the kind of cold that makes decisions seem brittle and breakable, like the wind might snap through his resolve. He turns and leaves before he can let it. 

The plan is to get out of the city, and he supposes he could easily sneak onto a ferry or a train and do just that, but he’s still not fully healed enough — he figures his best bet is to head back to his spot by the river, unearth the little money he has, and use it to take the PATH train like anyone else. He has no idea what will lay beyond it, but there’s no room for that now. He’ll go, and go, and go, and once he’s far enough away he’ll find some way to let MJ and Ned know he’s okay, and Johnny — 

Well. Johnny won’t miss him. For a week or two, maybe — but Peter knows he’s never quite belonged in Johnny’s world, and never really will. Not as Andrew, and certainly not as Peter Parker, in all of his dweebish, overly-earnest, naive glory. 

The idea of it swims in and out of his consciousness — this other world, where Peter is just Peter, and Johnny is still Johnny, and maybe they met the way they were supposed to, on the scene of some fight. Peter would be cheeky, and Johnny would be sly, and Tony would relentlessly mock them both. They’d have each other’s backs out in the open instead of in the shadows. Peter would be interning for Tony, helping him develop the Fantastic Four’s suits; Pepper would bully him, tell him to trust Johnny with his actual identity; and maybe one day, in Tony’s workshop, he’d sidle up to Johnny and say something clever — some reference to a conversation the Human Torch and Spider-Man had in the middle of some crisis — and Johnny would  _ know _ . He’d know who Peter really was. And right then and there, the spark would ignite, and it would flame, and the pair of them would be whole and happy and free to do whatever they —

_ Fuck.  _

It would have worked. It might have even been inevitable. And suddenly Peter is sick with the idea, with himself, for letting his thoughts play it out to the end: to a place where he can have everything he wants, and the biggest, brightest one of them all is Johnny Storm. 

* * *

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep. It’s the cold. It lulls him. Dampens his senses. He hasn’t dealt with it so well — not since the spider bite, at least — and before he knows it, the exhaustion has sunk bone-deep, and his eyes are shut, and the world is tunneling, and finally, impossibly quiet.  

It isn’t until he opens his eyes that he understands why. 

“Good morning, you fucking, ridiculous, stupid idiot.” 

It’s Johnny, and he’s angry again. 

It’s  _ Johnny? _ And he’s  _ angry again? _

No. No, no, no, no. Peter shuts his eyes, but maybe he shouldn’t. This is terrible, yes, but as far as dreams go, far from the worst one he’s ever had. If he leaves this one, he might end up somewhere worse — crushed in Thanos’s first, standing above May’s corpse, staring into the depths of MJ’s furious, haunted eyes. 

He opens his eyes again. Johnny is still there, and it’s warm, too warm for mid-December. Too warm for reality. Too warm for this dream too last.

“Andy.” 

Johnny’s hand is on his shoulder, nudging him. And it’s warm too, and everything is warm, and maybe Peter’s just dead. Maybe this is the dream you dream when you’re hypothermic and fading into some kind of light — you open your eyes into these teal blue ones, and you swim in the disbelief of them, and then you fall back asleep and wake up without your body, somewhere infinite and comforting and dark. 

“Why the  _ fuck _ wouldn’t you tell someone about this?” 

Peter blinks. And then, oh no, oh shit, oh  _ fuck _ . 

It’s not a dream. He’s in his little crawlspace on the East River, and he’s warm because Johnny Storm is sitting next to him, heating the air between and around them both. And the sun is splitting up over the horizon, and he understands in that moment, with his warm toes and warm fingers and the slight burning sensation where Johnny’s shoulder must have been wedged against his, that Johnny’s been here all night. 

“What … How are you …” 

“I followed you.” He can’t tell if Johnny’s furious or hurt or relieved, and neither, it seems, can Johnny. “I saw you in the library, and I was gonna talk to you until I saw you grab your books from a  _ hole in the wall _ and make out like a bandit, and then … and you’re just …”  

Peter buries his head in his hands. He didn’t think he had any pride left to shred, at least not until this moment, when the universe seems to be jumping rope with it — he wants the river to swell up from the ground and swallow him. He wants the pillars holding up the traffic on FDR to crumble over his head. He wants — he needs — 

He’s supposed to be gone. Clear off this island. And judging by the way Johnny was looking at him just now, the odds of him being able to do that in near the amount of time he needs to are just about shot. 

“Hey.” 

Johnny’s voice is softer than Peter’s ever heard it, low enough that he can barely hear it over the commuter traffic just beyond them. He opens his eyes into his fingers, forces himself to take his hands off of his face. He needs to come up with an excuse, and he needs to think of it fast. 

But the way Johnny’s looking at him now — the way something gives way in his expression, like Peter is wind, and Johnny has willingly become something in its wake — stills the lie on the tip of his tongue. Makes it taste bitter, like the batteries he’d lick to bring the CD players he’d unearthed from the dumpster back to life. 

“You don’t have to explain,” says Johnny.

It is the both the sweetest and most wretched thing he could say. Peter is not sure what is beating louder in his chest, the relief or the guilt. 

“Andy — just — say something. Are you … is this … just — you don’t have to explain,” he iterates, “but — ”

“My aunt is dead.” 

It falls out of him, tumbling down the rockface of him, a pebble that suddenly gives way to a landslide. 

“She was — she raised me. She’s dead. And so is Uncle Ben. And I …. “

“Andy.” 

“I just — it’s that I — she gave up everything for me, they both did, and I … they’re dead now. Because of me.” 

“Hey. That’s not true. That’s absolutely not — ”

“You don’t  _ know _ that.” Peter is stunned by his own outburst, but Johnny, oddly, seems unfazed. Peter doesn’t know what to make of it, except to say, the same way he did just hours before on that rooftop, “You don’t know what I put them through, what I — ”

“You’re right. Andy, I don’t — I don’t know much about your past. But I know you.” There’s this unwavering certainty in Johnny’s voice, something more concrete than his usual cockiness, something so sure that it feels rooted in the ground, deep under the wet earth keeping the city afloat. “You’re — Andy. You’re quiet sometimes, and just like, a complete fountain at others. You know more than anybody I’ve ever met. You’re funny, but funniest when you think nobody’s listening. You do this thing when you’re nervous, with your hands, and — ” Johnny starts mimicking him, his hands pressing into his sides, and then stops himself. “But it’s ridiculous that you’re ever nervous, because … the thing is, you’re good.” Johnny looks suddenly self-conscious, but not enough to stop. “So yeah, I don’t … I don’t know a lot about you. But I think that’s the most important thing. And I know that.” 

Peter feels the words settle over him, take on the kind of permanence in him that scares him — like Johnny just seared something across his heart that will never quite go away.

For so long he has compared this friendship he had with Johnny to whatever it was Johnny felt for Ghost, holding it up like some measuring stick. But he sees now that the difference isn’t between friendship and attraction. The difference was the urgency, the desperation, he felt with Johnny as Ghost, and how this — this is something softer. Something gentler, and more lasting; something that settled into his bones long before it was spoken out loud. Something so ancient that he knows he could lean in and kiss Johnny right now, and it wouldn’t be like the kiss on the rooftop yesterday — not a kiss that slammed a door, but a kiss that opened one. A kiss that pushed past this pain and into its own kind of infinity. 

But his head is too clear now, and his heart too full. He can’t do that to himself or to Johnny. 

“Johnny Storm,” he says instead. “I think you are the most surprising person I have ever met.” 

Which is to say:  _ I think you are the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. _ Which is to say:  _ I don’t know how I can live without you _ . Which is to say:  _ I love you, and now I’m scared it will never stop _ . 

He waits for Johnny to bristle, for him to tug at his hair or tense up in that insecure way he often does under scrutiny. But he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “Stay with us at the tower.” 

Peter opens his mouth because protesting is a reflex, but he knows better than to say anything now. He knows Johnny. Knows that he won’t take “no” for an answer. Knows that Johnny essentially has him cornered now, and it will be much easier to sneak out of the tower in the dead of night than it will be to try to run off right now. 

“I couldn’t,” he says anyway, just so Johnny doesn’t catch onto his plan. 

Johnny reaches out and grabs his hand, squeezing it. The warmth of it radiates through Peter’s fingers and into his whole body, like it’s in his blood. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to — it’s there in the silence, burning in his eyes. In that moment, Peter can see so much in them that he feels tangled in the threads of it — in this life he could have, this love he could share, this world he could build. 

Even the mere imagining of it is more than he deserves.

* * *

Johnny insists on getting them some breakfast on the way to the tower, as if it will bring some shred of normalcy to this situation. Peter follows, his hoodie hiked up high, as Johnny leads them back to the coffee shop where they studied on and off. Peter is silent, and Johnny fills up the space, talking too much and too fast in this endearing way that almost makes Peter smile despite himself.

“Dorie will hook us up,” Johnny says. They open the door, though, and there’s no sign of the barista and her usual long plaid coat. “Or … not.” 

Peter pauses in the doorway. There is something familiar — the smell of a particular aftershave, the rhythm of a particular sigh. And then, over by the display of desserts, is one unhappy looking Happy. 

Shit. Of fucking shit course  _ fuck —  _

“Oh, there she is.” 

Johnny’s looking over at Happy too, or just beyond him. Dorie is deep in conversation with him, her full-cheeked, moony face looking almost comical in its deep frown, talking to Happy in urgent, hushed tones. 

Peter turns to Johnny, wondering how he’s going to bow out of this one, but Johnny beats him to it. “Why don’t you, uh — grab us a table in the back.” 

“Sounds good.” 

Peter makes a mad dash for the back, out of Happy’s line of sight, his heart hammering in his chest. It is ridiculous, the relief he feels, just seeing Happy unharmed and alive and in the light of day. Such a relief that he can’t help himself from listening in, just to hear a familiar voice. 

Mostly, though, he hears Dorie’s — the usually cheerful barista now sounds anything but. 

“What’s Mr. Stark’s problem with me?” she’s asking. “I mean,  _ Johnny _ got to join a team, and he’s only a year older than me — ”

“It’s not about that, kid — ”

“And where is he, anyway? All the others say he hasn’t been around or weeks.” 

“He’s a busy man.” 

Peter isn’t sure what slams into him hardest; that Dorie is mentioning Tony, or that this conversation could be word-for-word one of a dozen conversations he had with Happy only a year before. 

“If he could just — I dunno, Hap, I have so many questions, and I just — the more I talk to the squirrels in Central Park, I — ’

“Uh, keep your voice down, maybe?” Happy interjects. 

“They’re worried. There’s this bad energy, or something. I feel it too. Like something beneath us.” 

“I’ll talk to Tony.”  

“No,  _ I  _ want to talk to Tony. I can’t just — sit around and do  _ nothing _ , when I’ve got so much to — ”

“Doreen. Please. You have no idea what is happening to people like you, when they get caught.” 

There’s a beat. When Dorie answers, her voice is small, almost defeated. 

“I don’t get it. Why do the Fantastic Four get to help, and the rest of us don’t?” 

“We’ve been over this, kid. I wish I had a better answer for you.” 

Peter assumes that will be the end of the conversation. It’s already more than he usually got. But then he can hear another sigh work its way up Happy’s throat, one that he doesn’t let out. 

“You’ve got a good heart,” Happy tells her. “I think — I hope — there will be a day we can have teams again. But right now …” 

“Right now?” 

Happy’s voice is unexpectedly tight. “We’ve lost people with good hearts.” 

Peter crushes his eyes shut, suddenly wishing he hadn’t heard a thing. 

“I just don’t want you to be one of them.” 

Johnny sits down in front of him then, his mouth in a troubled line. He sets down two coffees — his own black, and Peter’s with cream and sugar — and feels the warmth of being known, and the jolt something else start to shift. Something that maybe, if he had listened, MJ would have been able to tell him: a purpose here. A group of people he is actually in a position to help.  

“Johnny,” he says, his voice low. “Is Dorie … one of the others that were affected by that pulse that happened after Thanos?” 

There’s a moment when Johnny is too stunned to answer, but even in that moment, Peter doesn’t detect even one moment of hesitation or doubt. His trust in Peter is so whole and immediate that he doesn’t even try to deny it. 

“How do you know about that?” 

Peter listens to his own heart for a moment, to the steady rhythm in his chest, to the way it finally seems to anchor him instead of spiral him into places he doesn’t want to be. Because this, he understands, is where he is needed. These people need help. The kind of help he knows only he is prepared to give. The kind of help that can only come from someone who also ended up with powers they never asked for, in a time where nothing can put a larger target on someone’s back. 

"Because I — "

His sense for danger kicks in just in the knick of time; he leaps across the table, shoving Johnny out of the way, just as Iron Man comes hurtling through the window with enough force to rock the foundation of the city beneath them.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all. this week has been pure undiluted hell at my day job. the kinda shit i can't even vaguely allude to because of the legal ramifications of it. writing this fic has been a massive godsend in the midst of all this and y'all are my lifeblood right now for reading it. thank you for being here, and sorry for being a lil dramatic on this saturday night (at least i am not as dramatic as one peter benjamin parker, who as you can see, is still Doing The Very Most). 
> 
> in other news: THE TRAILER!! my trash heart is soaring. what are your theories??? who thinks tony's alive??? (i think tony's alive, FIGHT ME!!) who else is upsettingly attracted to jake verylonglastnameican'tspell, but only specifically in mysterio armor and popping out of green mist???? 
> 
> brb, watching it 18 more times and then going to bed.


	9. Chapter 9

There’s a moment — just after Peter has knocked Johnny to the ground, and before the screams of their fellow diners snap them back into the situation at hand — where a clear and brutal understanding seems to flicker in Johnny’s eyes. He glances at Peter, and then at one of Peter’s hands still clamped down on his shoulder, and they are both thinking the same thing: that he shouldn’t have been able to see that coming, and he sure as hell shouldn’t have been able to knock Johnny halfway across the room. 

“Stand  _ down _ , Nutcracker. I’ve got this.” 

It’s Tony, addressing Dorie, who has already mounted the barista station with her body tensed at the ready and what appears to be an actual, literal  _ tail _ coiled behind her. Peter is so momentarily stunned he almost forgets not to let Tony see him. 

“What the hell is — ”

Dorie is cut off by the answer to her question, which swerves into the cafe, flying through the air and settling just a few feet from where Peter is still on the ground and Johnny is scrambling back up. For a moment, every sound — the screams, the crunch of glass, Tony’s thrusters whirring back into action — are only white noise. 

Because Peter knows this enemy. Remembers him in a way that he didn’t before; remembers waking up from the snap on the remnants of Titan, breathless and wheezing and clawing for air, Mantis hovering over him and Quill shouting. Remembers this same creature — a child of Thanos, it called itself — heading straight for him. Coming to  _ collect _ . 

Until now all Peter has remembered is the void of the snap, and waking up on Quill’s ship. But now the rest of it comes back in jagged, excruciating pieces, a pain he has always felt just beneath his skin finally stabbing through:  _ You can’t fucking have him,  _ Quill was screaming,  _ he belongs on Earth _ . The creature, looming closer, and Quill yelling through his teeth:  _ I can’t move. I can’t move. He’s got me, I can’t —  _

The creature’s eyes, Peter remembers. If you looked into them, you froze. Only one person at a time, but that’s all it took; it froze Quill, and it knocked Mantis to the side, and it came for Peter, and Peter was so weak from the snap that he couldn’t even scream. 

It’s still a blur. He has no idea how he got out of the creature’s clutches, except that Quill and the others must have had one hell of a task getting him back. But this he knows for sure: it wanted Peter because it was assembling an army. It didn’t speak, but communicated its will to Peter, sent its own pulse directly into Peter’s brain: it wanted to create a new order, new children in Thanos’s stead, to take over the wreckage of what Thanos left behind. 

He grabs Johnny’s coat sleeve. “Don’t — don’t look it in the eyes.” 

Johnny gapes back at him, his mouth open. “What …” 

“Just  _ don’t _ .” 

Johnny is on his feet by then, and so is Peter, but the creature —  _ Dalthus _ , it called itself, its claw working its way down Peter’s face, the searing blood streaming down his cheek — has already advanced. 

“I said  _ stand down _ ,” Tony is yelling through his faceplate. Peter realizes Dalthus hasn’t managed to freeze Tony because he hasn’t been able to make direct eye contact through the Iron Man armor. This advantage is short-lived, though, because Dalthus is coming for Tony again, and Dorie isn’t having it. 

“Back the hell off, Reptar!” she yells. 

Johnny is about to erupt into flames, trying to come in between them, but he’s no match for her. She pounces with inhuman speed, her teeth bared, her knuckles bursting with sharp spikes, and then — 

And then she freezes. 

And so does Johnny. 

Peter gapes over at Dalthus, trying to understand. And then Dalthus, in all of his scaled, green, abhorrent glory, shifts his beady eyes over to Peter, as if resuming some conversation that these violent proceedings interrupted; as if he has been with Peter this entire time, and not a moment since he woke from the snap has passed. 

_ Children of Thanos, _ he says.  _ True children of Thanos. Born of his ashes. Unlike you, his power pulses in their veins.  _

Peter scrambles to his feet. He can’t breathe.

_ I can control them. Their blood is my blood; their will is my will _ . 

The room is spinning, the memories slamming into Peter like bricks — the way this monster tried to imprint on him, tried to bend his will. The way he tried to manipulate him, his voice slithering under Peter’s skin, his words burning in his veins. It never worked, in the end, and now Peter knows why. Dalthus thought Peter’s abilities were a result of Thanos’s pulse; thought his power was given to him after the snap, and that Peter could be controlled. 

Peter couldn’t. But Johnny and Dorie and who even knew how many others — evidently, they could be. Dalthus only used to be able to freeze one being at a time. But clearly that rule was out the window now; clearly he had more power over the people affected by the pulse than even in his nightmares, Peter could have predicted.  

“ _ Kid? _ ” 

It’s Happy, gaping at him disbelievingly. His eyes are wide, and then immediately brimming. Peter blinks at him, stunned by the rare display of emotion, by the genuine pain that twists in Happy’s face. 

Peter only wrenches his head away because Tony has lunged forward, attempting to take Dalthus down. Even using the full momentum of his thrusters, though, it doesn’t break the monster’s focus, or so much as leave a dent. He’s more powerful than he was when the Guardians took him down. Peter can feel the strength of him, the old terror of it coming back like a second heartbeat thrumming through his blood. 

Dalthus reaches forward and rips Tony’s faceplate off so easily it could be a child’s toy. He stares Tony in the eyes, and Tony freezes, too. And then, in Peter’s horror, he remembers; what it was that Quill and the others did to shake him off.

His eyes — they’re powerful, but sensitive. They can’t handle too much light. Light like — 

Johnny. 

Johnny, who is partially ignited right now, but nowhere near at the full extent of his full blazing glory. 

“Happy,” says Peter, his eyes sweeping from Johnny to the cleaning solution that Dorie was just using to wipe down the counters. “Can you — ”

Happy is way ahead of him, years of anticipating this kind of nonsense seeming to propel him; he snaps out of his clouded daze, wrenches the bottle of the counter and seamlessly uncaps it, spraying it in Johnny’s direction, igniting the tiny flame so that it blazes bright enough to blind everyone in the coffee shop. 

Dalthus shrieks. Johnny and Dorie unfreeze. The remaining bystanders in the cafe run for their lives. 

But Dalthus doesn’t release his grip on Tony — Tony, whose head has whipped around at the sound of Happy’s voice. Tony, whose eyes slam into Peter’s with enough force to shift the fragile, crumbling earth of the island beneath their feet. Tony, whose mouth parts in shock, whose body goes rigid, who stares at Peter with such palpable shock that even Peter is stunned at the fact of himself, that he let this happen, that he even still exists. 

Tony’s shock does not rattle Peter. Peter has been in enough skirmishes with Tony to have seen that face dozens of times before. But it’s the relief that follows — the clear, crushing misery of it, like he is being released from some kind of hell — that stills Peter more than Dalthus’s manipulation ever could.

“ _ Peter _ ,” he breathes. 

That relief is what costs him. That relief is what distracts him for just long enough that this time, when Dalthus tightens his grip on Tony, he engages his thrusters a beat too late. 

_ You will bring the children of Thanos to me,  _ says Dalthus, his words seeping into every crevice of Peter’s mind,  _ or this one will die while I wait _ . 

Dalthus snaps out of the coffee shop then, taking Tony with him. Peter sees black, gasps for a breath of air he hasn’t taken in minutes, and is about to clatter to his knees when Happy yanks him up by the elbows and steadies him instead. 

“You’re alive,” he hears Happy mutter. “Jesus — kid — ”

“What  _ was _ that?” Dorie is demanding, jumping off the counter and toward the broken window where they just disappeared. “Where’s Mr. Stark?”

Johnny’s head swivels over to Peter, accounting for him, before turning back to the window and muttering, “Dorie,  _ put your tail away _ .” 

“Right.” 

“I thought you were  _ dead _ ,” Happy mutters, righting Peter. He holds him there for a moment, bracing him with his hands on Peter’s shoulders. He looks so tired. “Where the hell have you  _ been? _ ” 

“I …” His throat tightens. Happy isn’t just looking at him now, but  _ looking _ at him, all of the traces of his usual reserves of sarcasm sucked right out of his face.

“Jesus,” says Happy. “What …” 

He lets Peter go, and then hovers for a moment, like he is unsure of what he is to Peter — something Peter might have thought himself, months ago, in the first world they lived in. Then Happy steps forward and unexpectedly pulls him into a one-armed hug. Peter stiffens — but then, for a stupid moment, he is so relieved that he feels like the kid he once was, the kid he still technically is. Someone he trusts is here. Someone who knows him, someone who understands him, someone who wants him to be safe. 

“I’m sorry,” Peter blurts, forgetting to hug him back. 

“Yeah, sure you are,” says Happy gruffly, squeezing him a bit tighter just before he lets him go. 

 Peter gasps out a laugh, one that is painful against the panic just starting to bubble beneath his skin. He turns back to the spot where Dalthus just disappeared with Tony, already trying to scrape with whatever bare information he has to formulate some kind of plan. 

“I know where he is. Where he took Tony,” Peter realizes, breathing the words out, horrified. Not because of where Tony is — but because Dalthus was able to transmit it. Push it into Peter’s head. An image, or a feeling, like he bent the waves in Peter’s brain around it: a secret tunnel, underneath the ruins of the Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island. The same island Peter has blearily opened his eyes to every day waking up in his hiding place on the East River, a tiny stretch of land in between Manhattan and Queens — the island that has served as some kind of emotional blinder for him in these past few months, blocking his view of his old home, separating him between Peter  _ then _ and Andrew  _ now _ . 

He doesn’t even realize he’s started to take off until Happy grabs his arm. 

“I gotta — I gotta help him, I gotta — ”

“Kid,” says Happy. The tone is familiar, but the remorseful look on his face is not. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.” 

Peter feels his revulsion for Dalthus so viscerally that it’s like acid in his throat. He tries to shake Happy off. “I do. I can — ”

Happy tightens his grip. “This isn’t two years ago. There is no back up. You understand?” 

Of course Peter understands. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t need backup. It doesn’t matter what happens to him anymore. 

There’s a moment when his eyes flash at Happy, warning him that he’s going to pull away, but then Happy’s expression stalls him. The way it sinks. The way he knows Happy sees something in him that Peter won’t say out loud: the meaning of Peter’s intent. The recklessness brimming too close to the surface, the carelessness. The value Peter no longer places on his own life, and stakes he no longer feels. 

For a moment he thinks Happy is going to say something that reflects the empathy in his expression, but then, in the next beat, it hardens. “You’re our best bet at getting Tony back. At stopping this thing. If you go out there like a maniac right now and something happens to you — he’s got nothing.” 

Happy was right to say it. It’s the only thing that could have given him pause. Peter hears the words and tries to let them sink in, tries to weigh them against the pulse of  _ save Tony, save Tony, save Tony _ , but there’s too much noise and too much fear and just altogether too much. 

Happy takes a breath like he’s going to say something else — like he’s going to address the way Peter seems to have no caution, no regard for his own wellbeing anymore — but Peter turns around before he can, straight into Johnny, who looks less like himself and more like a brick wall. 

His cheeks are red, his eyes flashing with indignation. It’s clear in that moment that there is no more lying. That Johnny doesn’t just know; he  _ knows _ . And even though Peter has had months to prepare for this kind of inevitability, it still manages to take him by surprise, still manages to cut to some place he forgot to protect. 

“You’ve seen that creature before,” says Johnny. 

At this, Happy snaps to attention, and even Dorie, who was fretting over by the window, perks her ears to listen. 

Peter bites down on the inside of his cheek, bracing himself for the fallout. “I have.” 

Happy’s eyes flit back and forth between the two of them. “You two know each other?” 

“Andy,” says Johnny, pleading, like he’s trying to understand. “You — you knew what it could do.” 

Happy blinks at the unfamiliar name, but otherwise doesn’t miss a beat — then again, he was in on this from the start. He and Tony may be the only ones who know just how far his webs of lies reach.

Peter closes his eyes for just a moment, and then, resigned, says, “Yes.” 

“And the way you saw it coming — your reflexes, you — why didn’t you … why didn’t you  _ tell  _ me?” Johnny asks, low enough that Dorie can’t hear, and Happy barely can. “You’re — you’re like me, aren’t you? All this time — ”

“Andrew wasn’t allowed to say anything,” says Happy, cutting him off. “His parents were a part of SHIELD. He’s been in protection programs ever since their deaths.” 

Johnny’s jaw drops. So does Peter’s. 

Happy is straight-faced enough that even Peter starts to believe the lie. “So yes, he has some training, and privileged knowledge,” says Happy, with a quiet, ridiculously believable urgency, “but there have been forces much more powerful than either of you keeping his mouth shut about it. Do you understand?” 

The blood has all but drained from Johnny’s face. “Y-yes.” 

Peter turns to Johnny, the guilt from this fresh lie already aching in his bones. Before he can fully feel it, Dorie walks over to them, scowling, and says, “Just FYI, if any of this was like, meant to be covert … I heard everything.” She clears her throat. “And that’s like, not even one of my powers. Y’all were just being super loud.” 

Peter clenches his teeth. Looks at all three of them in turn: Happy, with his open concern; Johnny, with his embarrassment; Dorie, with her curiosity and her fear. 

“Good,” he says, after a moment. “Because it’s going to take all of us to get Tony back.” 

* * *

“Um — sorry, but. Is this place usually like, a total crypt?”

An hour has passed since the coffee shop incident, and now Johnny, Peter, and Dorie are in the Baxter Building, which is — as Dorie noted — unusually quiet. Peter takes a few steps into it, perking his ears, but there’s not a single human sound beyond the three of them in the whole place. 

“Sue?” Johnny calls. “Reed? Terrafreak?” 

“Be nice,” says Dorie. 

Johnny ignores her, walking further into the lobby, poking his head into the lab. Peter has a fresh kind of dread crawling under his skin, like it’s seeped out of Johnny and Peter is breathing it in the air. 

“I’m Squirrel Girl, by the way.” 

Peter blinks, and sees Dorie has extended out her hand for him to shake. He takes it, but before he can introduce himself, Johnny blows out a breath and says, “I keep telling you it’s not too late for a rebrand.” 

Dorie swats at him with her tail. “Call yourself Spider-Man and sure, fine, everyone’s chill. But Squirrel Girl is too weird for you?” 

“It’s just that we had a very constructive conversation in which we agreed that Nut Buster was your best bet, and I’m hurt you went in another direction.” 

It’s funny, but neither of them laughs. Johnny’s voice is strained. Peter’s almost heartbreakingly used to this routine — the way Johnny falls back on humor when he’s scared. It was something Peter used to do himself, when he first started fighting crime. Some kind of security blanket, a layer of protection between him and the badness of the world. That is, until Peter got used to the badness of the world, and the humor was more to amuse himself through it than survive it. 

Johnny’s not quite there yet, though. It reminds Peter of how painfully new to this Johnny still is, how much of a burden it must be to try to reconcile having abilities in this post-Thanos, Accords-ruled world. It makes his heart ache for Johnny in a way he is almost certain Johnny can feel, like there is some tether between them. 

If he does, though, he doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t acknowledge Peter at all. 

“I’m Andrew,” says Peter, trying to swallow back his unease. “I’m — a friend of Johnny’s.” 

Dorie nods, shaking his hand. Thankfully, there aren’t spikes coming out of them anymore. “And basically a Spy Kid.” 

Peter cracks a reluctant smile, only because hers is infectious. “Yeah, sure.” 

Johnny pointedly doesn’t look at him, the way he hasn’t really looked at Peter since they left the shop. After Happy dropped his ridiculously convenient lie, he took off to get in touch with Pepper and, Peter suspects, MJ, whose role in this new world seems to be more clear than ever: she isn’t just helping with relief efforts. It seems, through her ties with Stark Industries and Johnny and all the other weird coincidences in between, that she must be trying to help people affected by the pulse, in a way that the ruins of SHIELD no longer can. 

Peter knows he has a storm coming to him when MJ sees him again, but he can handle that. What he can’t handle is the way Johnny seems to be skirting around him right now, with this strange kind of civility, like he’s a stranger. 

And arguably, he is. 

“So, you think that douche from the Land Before Time can only affect those of us who got our powers after the whole Thanos thing?” asks Dorie, making herself at home by sitting in one of the stools in the kitchen and propping her legs up on the counter. “In that case, first order of business should probably be warning the others.” 

“Happy and MJ on it,” says Johnny, still pacing through the space. He pauses for a moment, like he’s going to address Peter, clearly remembering the incident outside of the elevator the day before. Peter is almost disappointed when he keeps pacing, changing his mind. 

“Yeah, well — someone’s gotta warn the  _ other _ others. The ones Stark hasn’t reached yet. Like that Ghost kid.” 

“Ghost isn’t — he had powers before Thanos,” says Johnny. “He’s not … anyway, we don’t have a way to reach him.” 

“I do,” Peter blurts. He’s not even sure why, until Johnny looks at him. That’s the crux of it, maybe — making Johnny look at him. Acknowledge him. So he can feel like there is some sliver of normalcy here, some chance he hasn’t completely severed Johnny’s trust and blown this whole thing to hell. “We knew each other. I mean, I know of him. From my parents being — SHIELD, and all.” 

God, it feels weird to even say the words  _ my parents, _ let alone commit to the rest of the lie. Their faces are so fuzzy in his memory that he’s not even sure if he’s allowed to lay claim on them anymore.

Johnny doesn’t take this information in stride, seeming visibly shaken by it. “You … know Ghost.” 

It’s a question, but not the one he means to ask. The one he he means to ask is,  _ You know who Ghost really is?  _

Peter’s the one who looks away this time. “I don’t know him super well, but — yeah.” 

There’s a dip of silence, a tension Peter doesn’t know how to resolve. Dorie fills it: “Okay, so your boyfriend can get Ghost to help us. That’s something.”

“I’m not his — ” 

“He’s not my — ”

“Yes, yeah, I should be able to — yeah,” says Peter, his face burning. He has no right to feel embarrassment as trivial as this when Tony’s life is on the line, but there it is anyway, 

Dorie lets out a breath. “Sidestepping the can of worms I just opened, how can we be sure Ghost will want to help?” she asks. “I mean … it seems like everyone from before has gone underground.” 

“He’ll help Tony,” says Peter. Dorie looks doubtful. Johnny’s still not looking at him at all. “No matter what.” 

There’s a beat, and then: “Well — get to it, then. Go.” 

Johnny’s voice is so harsh that even Dorie does a double-take. Peter, on the other hand, doesn’t move. He’s expecting it, maybe. Has been expecting it for some time. Whatever it is he had with Johnny — friendship, a near-relationship, or something in between — was always more than Peter deserved, was always too good to last. 

Even Johnny seems to realize how he sounds, softening it with, “I mean, I know you don’t have a phone, and Ghost is off the grid. So however you’re planning to get in touch with him …” 

“Right,” says Peter. “I’ll — I’ll go.” 

Which is precisely his intention, except the doors open again just then, and MJ walks inside, with Happy in tow. Her eyes find Peter so fast that it feels like a bite. 

“At some point you are going to find yourself locked in a  _ very _ small space so I can scream at you,” she says, her words coiled in fury. But she sweeps past him and briefly grabs his arm, squeezing it hard enough that some warmth starts pulsing through him, knocking him out of his misery. “But lucky for you there’s no time.” 

“So you two  _ do _ know each other,” says Johnny, some mix of surprised and accusatory. 

“Yes, we made each other friendship bracelets at SHIELD kid summer camp,” MJ mutters, evidently caught up to the lie Happy fed Johnny and Dorie and adding a lie of her own. “Pepper’s still en route from DC, which makes me the least bullheaded person in this room, so I’m electing myself in charge of making a plan. Happy says you’re familiar with this … creature?” 

Peter suppresses a shudder. He still can’t get the stain of Dalthus out of his brain. 

“Yes,” he says, “but he’s stronger now. That is — he has more control. He can freeze anyone one at a time, but it looks like he can freeze anyone affected by the pulse at once — ”

“So that essentially rules out all of Johnny and his merry band of science nerds?” 

Johnny takes a step forward. “Except he clearly can’t handle fire, or light, or whatever it was, so you can still use me to — ”

“Not without backup, we can’t,” MJ mutters. 

Johnny motions over at Peter, the most acknowledgement he’s gotten since the debacle back at the coffee shop. “Andrew said he can get Ghost.” 

_ Andrew _ . Not Andy. Even in the height of his panic over Tony, it manages to slice him between the ribs. 

MJ’s eyes narrow. “This  _ Ghost _ is a friend of yours?” she says, which is actually to say:  _ You fucking fuck, you absolute fucker, it was you the whole time.  _

Happy lets out a sigh, making it clear he made the connection, too. Peter clears his throat, looking away from them both. 

“Andy is apparently the Gossip Girl of vigilante superheroes,” says Dorie. 

MJ’s eyes snap over to Dorie, noticing her for the first time. Some of the anger seems to unstiffen in her posture, and she says curtly, “Nice tail.” 

Dorie juts her chin, waiting for a beat like she’s sussing MJ out. “Nice boots.” 

MJ allows herself the smallest of smirks, briefly grazing her eyes up and down Dorie. “If we survive the next 24 hours I have a  _ lot _ of questions, but first — flame boy, where the hell  _ is _ your team?” 

Johnny’s mouth opens defensively, but he can’t hold onto it. “I … I don’t know,” he admits. 

Happy speaks for the first time since he arrived, saying grimly, “Tony had a meeting here, with the three of them, about how to move forward with all the new vigilantes starting to come out of the woodwork after Thanos.”

This is clearly news to Johnny, the hurt streaking across his face. 

“If Tony was fighting that thing, well — I can only assume it came after the Fantastic Four first.” 

“Shit,” Johnny says under his breath, turning around abruptly. He isn’t fast enough. The terror in his eyes is so palpable that it brings a momentary hush to the room. 

Peter takes a step forward, to comfort him, or just to be near him, he doesn’t know — but Happy touches his arm. “We’ll need more than Ghost,” he says lowly. “Are any of the others still in touch with you?” 

_ The others _ , he says carefully, but Peter knows what he means. The Avengers. People Peter barely knew, let alone fought with. People who died, or scrambled to points unknown, or protected him and then disappeared. There’s a lump in his throat so thick that he knows Natasha would berate him for it.  _ Move forward _ , she’d snap at him.  _ You can’t fix what’s been done. Keep your eyes up front.  _

He’s trying. He will. He will bury the shame, the uncertainty, the fear. He owes Tony that much. 

“No,” he says, “but I can … I can try.” 

He nods at MJ, who cocks her head in acknowledgement, and starts to leave. Happy follows him out, so quietly that Peter knows there will be no escaping his line of questions — that he’s going to have to come clean about everything, all at once. 

He doesn’t care anymore. Not with Tony’s life on the line. The stakes are too high for any more lies. 

Sure enough, Happy stops just outside the elevator bay, with enough authority that Peter knows he’s expected to stop, too. He does, and then catches himself rocking back on his heels that way he did at fifteen, when he was expecting a lecture. He’d laugh, if he still had the ability to right now. Both because it’s a little funny, and because there is this sudden quiet he isn’t anticipating — Happy isn’t lecturing him. In fact, he looks almost tongue-tied, like he doesn’t know what to say. 

It’s a reflex, an old one that Peter is surprised he still has: that need to fill quiet up, to smooth things over, to be the one who makes the hard things a little less hard by cushioning them with words. 

“Nice thinking,” he says. “With the, uh — SHIELD thing, and my parents, and all. That was a better cover than I could have thought up.” 

Happy’s lips thin into a tight line. The quiet becomes more pronounced, the kind that Peter can’t will away with words, the kind he knows he has to wait out. 

“It wasn’t a cover,” says Happy. “Kid … listen.” 

He doesn’t want to. He has to. He can’t. 

“Your parents — they  _ were _ SHIELD.” 

Peter shakes his head. “My parents were professors.” 

Happy doesn’t contradict him, just looks at him with eyes more solemn than Peter has ever seen them. 

“My parents died in a car accident.” 

“Your parents were …” 

Happy blows out a breath. It occurs to Peter, in that moment, that Happy is a man accustomed to delivering bad news. That if he is hesitating now, it can only mean he is delivering the kind of news that transcends bad, that belongs in a category all its own. 

“Your parents were … dealt with,” says Happy. “Because of what they did.” 

Peter blinks at him, his stomach sinking, his heart hammering in between his ears. He waits, even though he doesn’t want to; he waits, because he has learned that knowing is less dangerous than not knowing. That knowing brings pain, but that the pain is what keeps him alive. 

“Because of what they did to you.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please forgive me for the amount of time it has taken to update — my day job drama worked itself out, but the other job has been b o n k e r s. things that were squared away got unsquared and i had to look deep within my hufflepuff heart and stand up for myself in a big scary way, but it all ended up okay in the end, after like a solid week or so of No Sleeps. but writing this kept me sane and y'all are beautiful and bless this fandom and everyone in it. 
> 
> also is anybody else wigging out that spider-verse is hitting digital in less than a week and captain marvel hits theaters VERY VERY SOON???? i am such a happy bean. i am taking myself out on a solo date to see captain marvel and will 1000000% weep through the whole thing, i am sure. if there is even one vaguely spider-man-esque easter egg in that movie, i will die the kind of death you can't come back from, so assume if that does happen that i won't be updating for at least 1,000 years. 
> 
> anyway, hoping this next update will come much faster than this one. thank y'all again for bearing with me. your feedback makes me happier than my dweeby words could ever say <3\. as usual, you can hit me up on my side blog, upcamethesun on tumblr!


	10. Chapter 10

The awful truth is, Peter doesn’t remember much about his parents.

He remembers things that matter and things that don’t — remembers the _click_ of his father’s briefcase, the _zip_ of his mother’s shoulder bag, remembers the click of their shoes and the creak of the doorknob, the sounds of them coming and going and coming back again. Tight hugs against his ribs and firm kisses on his hairline. His dad called him _buddy_ and his mom called him _pie-in-the-sky_ , his dad smelled sharp and fresh and his mom smelled soft and rosy and maybe they weren’t around much, but they knew how to make moments count. He remembers the feeling of being heard. Not understood, always, but heard. Appreciated. Loved.

“Did to me?” Peter repeats.

Happy considers him for a moment, like he’s trying to decide if Peter can handle it. “There’s a reason … you are the way that you are.”

Peter huffs out a pained laughed. “Like, an orphan? Because — ”

“No, kid, your …”

Happy hesitates. Peter scowls. “You can tell me,” he says. “I don’t —  it’s not going to like, derail me, Hap. They’ve been dead longer than I knew them alive.”

Happy winces, but goes ahead anyway. “Your abilities,” he elaborates. “You parents — ”

“Were _super_ dead by the time that happened,” Peter cuts in. He can’t swallow down his irritation — that Happy isn’t just bringing up old ghosts, but wasting precious time.

“That’s the thing — they may be responsible. Well, they are, for some of — ”

“Unless their ghosts cooked up whatever they were feeding the spiders in that OsCorp lab, I sincerely doubt it,” says Peter. And here it is — the anger. The rumble before the earthquake. The hurt he has held so close to his chest since Tony and Happy all but abandoned him that there is no room for it now, that it feels like a few words is all it will take for it to erupt. “I was bitten by a radioactive spider on a field trip. The dumbest origin story you can ask for, but I know I didn’t, like, imagine it. I almost died afterward — ”

“But you didn’t.”

It takes every fiber of Peter’s being not to say, _No shit_.

“It should have killed you,” says Happy.

Peter blows out a breath. “Lucky me.”

“It _did_ kill people. Several people, in fact. You weren’t the only one bitten that day,” says Happy, his expression grave. “You were just the only one who lived.”

Peter shakes his head, reaching for the elevator button — he’s not even sure why. He’s on a fake mission here. Get ahold of “Ghost,” then head back up here like an idiot to say he’s secured him.

“None of my classmates were — ”

“No, the geneticists. When the spiders broke out — it killed them. Instantly. But not you.”

He can’t acknowledge it. It’s too much, too fast, to be believed. “The only time Parker luck went in my favor, then,” he mutters, the bitterness so fresh that he can feel it like acid running through his veins.

Happy steps forward, putting himself between Peter and the elevator. “It _was_ Parker luck. Your parents … they were developing a serum.”

Peter doesn’t want to hear this. “What do you know about my parents?”

“It’s Tony who — ”

“Screw Tony,” Peter blurts, “if he thinks he knows _anything_ about — if he’s out talking crap about my parents, when he — I was their kid. They wouldn’t hurt me, they would never — ”

“I’m not saying they did, kid. The opposite, in fact. The serum — it was a healing serum. It … it was supposed to give humans the ability to heal faster, to stop them from getting sick. The vaccine to end all other vaccines.”

Peter shakes his head. “What are you trying to say, that they tested it on me? Because my healing factor came from the bite, not — ”

“Your … spider nonsense came from the bite. Your healing factor? That came from your parents injecting you with the serum.”

Peter shakes his head violently. “That’s — Jesus, Happy,” he says, brushing past him and hitting the elevator button again. “First of all — I was like — stupid sick as a kid. I had asthma and needed corrective lenses and all kinds of — ”

“That’s the thing, kid. What Tony figured out — “

“ _Tony_ doesn’t even seem to remember I was alive, let alone — ”

“The serum, its effects take a few years to manifest. Tony brought in Bruce and Helen, and that’s what they figured out when they took a look at it.”  

The anger skyrockets then, is so overwhelming that is pierces right past him, punctures him like a balloon — he can’t hold it in him anymore, can’t hold anything. Suddenly he just wants more than anything to sit. Here on the goddamn carpet, in some corner where he’s left alone, without these unwelcome thoughts rattling in his head — the voice he is suddenly hearing —  _Just hold still, pie-in-the-sky. It’ll sting, but only for a second,_ she tells him. Her eyes are wide and brown and deep. She’d never lie to him. Not even about pain. _Think about your favorite ice cream_ , she tells him, _and then, when we’re done, we’ll go get it_.

“Think about it. Before the bite. Did you ever get sick? Ever get hurt, and notice it just kind of … went away?”

Peter closes his eyes, and remembers other things. MJ, making fun of him for his perfect attendance award at eighth grade graduation. The school’s optometrist chuckling and accusing him of cheating on his annual eyesight check. Flash’s older cousin beating the shit out of him, kicking bruises into his body that had yellowed and faded by the next day.

A cone of mint chip ice cream from the Baskin-Robbins down the street from his parents’ little house in Queens.

When he opens his eyes again, it feels like they’re burning. “So Tony just decided he didn’t give a shit, then, until my parents’ stupid serum hit his radar? Is that it?” he snaps. “Is that the only reason he gives a shit I’m still alive, when — ”

“Jesus, kid — what on earth would make you — ”

“Because I …” He feels like he’s made of helium, too light, too easily pushed by the air around him.  “Because …”

“He’s been desperate to reach you — ”

Peter shakes his head. The elevator doors finally open. He can’t bring himself to walk into them. “I called,” he says, more to himself than to Happy. “I called so many times.”

“Kid, he thought — we all thought you were _dead._ ”

“I _called_ ,” says Peter, louder this time. “ _Before_ that. I needed T — I needed help. I needed — ”

He cuts himself off. _Needed_. It sounds so stupid now. He didn’t end up needing anyone, in the end, did he? He survived just fine on his own.

“Kid,” Happy asks lowly. “What happened?”

Peter shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter,” he mumbles. “Thing is, seems like Tony wasn’t looking for me at all until my weird blood had something he wanted.”

“Your — _what?_ ”

“That’s really why he was looking for me, isn’t it? Otherwise why the hell does it suddenly matter where I got my powers from?” It’s anger, or despair, it’s wanting too much from someone he knows isn’t in any way obligated to give it. “Otherwise why does he suddenly digging into my parents’ death?”

“That’s the thing,” says Happy, and oh God, Peter wishes he hadn’t. It’s such a little throwaway phrase, a substance-less nothing, but it weighs just enough to tip everything back down. “Your mother — we think she’s still alive.”

Peter’s ribs feel like they just suctioned all of the air in the room. Somehow, that doesn’t stop him from looking away from Happy and muttering, clearly and succinctly, “Fuck you.”

Peter can’t see Happy, but he can feel the familiar rhythms of his exhaustion, can feel him closing his eyes and trying to navigate this. That’s all Peter is, really — something adults have to navigate. Handle. Deal with. It doesn’t matter how many ties he cuts, how much he goes through on his own, he’s just someone else’s to-do list at the end of the day.

“Someone tried to target you. Natasha told us.”

“She _what?_ ”

“Only when she realized it was a need-to-know basis,” says Happy, in her defense. “She used to work with your mother.”

“Stop. _Stop_. What are you — “

“The people who tried to kill you. They weren’t Ross’s people, they weren’t connected to Thanos. They were trying to eradicate the last of your parents’ work.”

“You mean me.”

“Yes, you. They don’t know that Tony has an undiluted version of the serum.”

Peter can’t decide what’s more appealing, sinking to his knees or punching a hole in the wall. “And how the hell did he get _that?_ ”

“Anonymously. Someone sent it with a note, directly to him,” says Happy. “There was an encrypted message in it that only Natasha could have decoded.”

Peter doesn’t believe him. Doesn’t _want_ to believe him. “Saying what,” he says anyway — less of a question, more of an accusation.  

Happy waits a moment. “Protect Peter,” he finally says.

* * *

The elevator can’t come fast enough, so Peter ducks into the stairwell. Trouble is, it only goes down the one flight; someone has sectioned it off in the last few weeks, put some divider between the penthouse and the other floors. Peter could knock down the door and get past the lock in an instant, if he wanted to, but even at his most senseless he has too much sense for that.

Instead he slumps against the wall, letting himself slide down it, crouching with his head in his hands. He tries to remember, tries to piece the mismatched quilt of his memories back together. His parents, the serum, the accident …

The accident. He was nine. Ben and May with their red eyes, their cracked, hoarse voices. The little things that told him the big thing before they had to say it out loud: _I’m so sorry, Peter. They didn’t make it._

If his mother really is alive — if after all this time, eight years of grief and unanswered questions, of a hollow pit in his stomach — of the reflexive answers anytime someone asked him, _You live with your aunt and uncle?_ The way he’d learned to brush it off, to put other people at ease, to act like it hadn’t sliced into some part of his soul that would never heal. The way he’d learned to live without them, but live with their ghosts, so present that even now he can feel the weight of them crushing the air out of his lungs.

He can’t. He _can’t_. He forgave, because he understood. He forgave, because they didn’t mean to leave him.

He forgave, but this — this is unforgivable. If she really did survive — if she’s been here, all this time, and hasn’t ever —

“Listen, if we’re really going to play baby Avengers here and save Tony Stark’s sorry ass, you’re gonna have to pull your head out of yours.”

It’s MJ’s voice, creeping in through the stairwell. Peter knows the layout of the penthouse like the back of his hand — they must be in Johnny’s room.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re pissed at Andy. Get over it.”

“Get over it?” Johnny snorts, like it doesn’t matter to him, but the way his voice twists when he speaks again gives him away. “He _lied_ to me — “

“So the fuck what? I lied to you.”

“That’s different — ”

“It’s extremely the same. But you’re not mad at me, and you _are_ mad at him, so you can either come to terms with why or compromise this entire mission over your whiny little spat.”

“I … what the hell are you trying to say?”

“Ugh, don’t make me spell it out for you. I already had to with Ned and Betty and that was so exhausting that I’m still trying to catch up on my beauty sleep from it.”

“You think I’m into _Andy?_ ”

“I _know_ you are.”

Johnny’s laugh is bitter. Caustic. The ring of it in Peter’s ears is a pain more physical than emotional, reverberating through the wall and straight into the core of him.

“Trust me. Andy and I are — were — just friends.”

“Ugh, you’re a worse liar than Ross.”

“It’s not like that. He’s — a friend. Or he was. I don’t …”

Peter doesn’t hear anything else. Doesn’t _let_ himself hear anything else. He’s already unraveling, and this — this is what will undo him. For so long, all he has had is Johnny. Or maybe just the idea of Johnny. The happiness he feels just being near him, the stupid hope that surges against the hopelessness every time he walks into a room — the one good thing in Peter’s life, the thing he realizes now is too good to be true.

It was over before this, really. It was over the moment Johnny kissed Ghost. Kissed _Spider-Man_. Kissed someone who was not Andy, the closest version of himself Peter is allowed to be. Johnny doesn’t want him. Johnny wants something that only half exists.

Peter heads back up the stairs, with every intention of sneaking back into the penthouse and leaving out of one of the windows. He doesn’t know where he’s planning to go or what he’s planning to do, but none of that matters in the next instant, because in that instant Dalthus sends the kind of message to him that makes every other waking detail in his life fall away.

It’s less of a message and more of an image. Something conjured from a nightmare. Of course, Peter’s lived through enough of those that he can’t separate them from reality anymore.

 _You come alone_ , Dalthus tells him. The image finishes the sentence for him: Tony, unconscious, with Dalthus’s crackling weapon held to his neck. Peter crushes his eyes shut, but that’s the problem. They’re already shut. The world is gone, it’s all just Tony’s slack face and Dalthus’s menacing breaths, and the quiet more terrifying than the noise. The quiet that promises to make good on the threat.

It only gets worse from there. Dalthus steps back, and Peter sees them all in a row — Reed. Sue. Ben. Two other people he doesn’t know. _Children of Thanos_. People Dalthus trapped.

He projects the thought into the ether, knowing Dalthus will hear it. Knowing he’ll hear everything.

_What do you want?_

Dalthus’s answer is swift: _Your compliance._

Peter can’t give that. Could never.

 _And if not that — your blood_.

There it is, then. The crushing affirmation that Happy was right. That there really is something different about him — something more than the ability to crawl up a wall, or sense danger from a mile away. Something more than any of the tenuous ways he has defined himself since this whole shit show began. Something so big that even beings beyond their world want a piece of it.

He can’t do it. He knows better. At least he thinks he does, until Dalthus sends another message into his consciousness, the kind that leaves a scar before it even leaves a mark: the sound of Tony’s screams.

* * *

It takes him twenty minutes to get there. Twenty minutes he spends trying to come up with a plan. He doesn’t know which one he’ll have to fall back on, but he knows the way it has to end: he’s going to die in the next hour. It’s the only way.

He’s a smart kid. Hasn’t that been what everyone said from the beginning? _Look at my handsome little nerd_ , May used to say, squeezing him tight after sitting through two hours of decathlon nonsense. _My sweet smart boy_ , his mom used to call him, the memory rising up in him like a coil, tightening around his chest. He is smart. Always has been. And that’s how he knows that whatever Dalthus wants from his blood — the healing factor, the root of what his parents created — it’s worthless, if Peter is dead.

It’s the only thing that makes sense. That’s why Dalthus has let him live, back at the coffee shop. Why the people who were after his parents’ serum wanted to kill him, all those weeks ago. Because alive, Peter is a threat. A weapon. Something that could be used in infinite ways, the potential more terrible than it is great.

Dead, Peter is nothing at all.

But his death can have purpose. He can save Tony. Save Sue and Reed and Ben and the others. Save what’s left of his family, and what’s left of Johnny’s.

So that’s the plan, then. Engage Dalthus in a fight that he knows he can’t lose, because Dalthus can’t kill him. Fight him just long enough for Tony and the others to escape. And then let himself get killed in the crossfire.

It will be easy to do, he thinks. There have been so many near-misses, so many almost-disasters, that he has been flirting with death since before he fully knew what it meant. The hum of the drone that almost decimated him at the expo. The bullet that screamed in his ears and sliced through his uncle. The breathless impact of too many crashes and hits to count. The half-life after he dissolved, the gone but not gone, the remembering but not remembering. If death is like that, he can do it again. Let it take him. Maybe this time it will even be peaceful. Maybe this time he’ll get to see people he loves on the other side.

The outside of the abandoned hospital is in ruins, grim and exposed in the fading sunlight. Peter hazards a glance back, toward Manhattan and where the sun is setting beyond it; then forward, just beyond the hospital, where Queens begins and the sum total of Peter’s world ends. He closes his eyes. He tries to make peace with his decision. And when he can’t, he does the only thing he’s ever known how to do — he just keeps going anyway.

 _I’m here,_ he tells Dalthus.

But Dalthus already knows. Peter can already sense him, rising up out of the tunnel to meet him. The area is strangely empty, all of the tiny island’s inhabitants and visitors somehow repelled from the spot. But Dalthus is single-minded. He doesn’t want an audience. He wants to conquer, by the fastest and cruelest means necessary.

“You’ve presented yourself in quite an alternative manner,” Dalthus observes.

Peter whips around to face Dalthus, who has materialized behind him. He changed into the uniform Johnny helped design for Ghost before he came here. For some reason it seemed important to die this way. As if it tethered him to something, made it matter in a way he knows he never will on his own.

He plants his heels into the dirt. “You get nothing from me until they’re free. That was the deal.”

Dalthus may be scum, but he’s a creature of his word. “What is it you will give me in return?”

Peter closes his eyes. “My blood,” he promises.  

Dalthus assesses him. Listens to his heartbeat. Tries to find the lie. There isn’t one, though — because Peter _will_ give him his blood. He will shed however much of his own blood is necessary. The term Dalthus failed to set was whether Peter would be alive or dead when it happened.

“Not your compliance, then?”

Peter shakes his head. Tries not to shudder as he feels the invasive probe of Dalthus in him, scouring his mind, pressing into his every bone. “No,” he says, through grit teeth. “Blood, and blood only.”

“You’re expecting to fight.”

Not expecting. “Waiting,” he corrects Dalthus, his body poised, the air thick. There’s a dark lens over his mask to shield himself, but he intentionally has kept his gaze averted just in case, not letting Dalthus connect with him — if he’s frozen, he can’t let himself die.

That said, he has a backup plan. He found it in Reed’s lab. They’d been tinkering around with the suits for so long they were going stir-crazy, so Reed had let him assist with something Sue had been working on, some kind of recovery pill to accelerate their healing time. Peter had dissociated a bit, out of guilt — he’d been so reckless at the time that he’d taken his healing factor for granted — but he wasn’t so removed that he didn’t notice Sue swatting at Reed and saying, “Do _not_ mess with my labeling system. Those two are lethal together.”

Reed put his hands up in surrender, yielding to her color-coded system, but still joked: “If that’s the case, why aren’t we putting _that_ in a pill for the next time someone tries to off us?”

Sue rolled her eyes at him, and that was that. Or at least it would have been, if Peter hadn’t remembered exactly what those two ingredients were. If he hadn’t searched on an untrackable browser on one of the computers at school to make sure Sue was right. If he hadn’t snuck back into the lab just now, mixed the two powders into one of Reed’s empty pill capsules, and tucked it into the glove of his uniform.

“Unless you let them go,” says Peter. “Then there doesn’t have to be a fight at all.”

Dalthus’s body eases back, almost like he’s letting out a sigh. “The best I can offer you is their survival.”

Peter grinds his heels into the cement. “That’s not enough.”

“Very well.”

The first hit is so savage and unexpected that Peter is less aware of the hit and more aware of the noise his cheek makes when the bone cracks against the ground. Dalthus has materialized behind him, stricken him from behind. There will be no honor in this fight.

The world is black and spotting in the periphery, but Peter is too practiced at this, his body broken but still as brutal and precise as a machine. He leaps to his feet, extending a leg out to trip Dalthus, just unexpectedly enough that Dalthus has to disappear and rematerialize a few feet away to prevent himself from falling. Peter shoots his webbing at the abandoned building — he has nothing to lose now, exposing himself — and flings himself toward the sound of the unconscious heartbeats beneath them, where they are just barely pulsing through a hollow part of the ground.

Dalthus is behind him in an instant, but this time Peter is ready, shooting his webbing directly into Dalthus’s eyes. He lets out an indignant yell, and Peter scrambles forward, blinking the thick stream of blood out of his eyes.

And there — he can’t see it so much as hear it. The entry to the underground. Under a pile of seemingly abandoned concrete bricks, maybe some kind of optimistic attempt to keep the place in tact that nobody ever followed through on, is earth too soft to be earth — Peter wrenches the bricks up and they immediately give way to a muggy, dirt-filled drop. He throws himself into it, knowing Dalthus isn’t far behind, knowing that he will never feel the sun on his skin again.

Somehow he beats Dalthus down. The place is pitch-dark, but Peter can still see, blinking as his vision returns and the pain starts to sear through his head. There’s a mechanism in the mask of the suit that will expose his surroundings — he sets it off at full capacity, hoping the brightness of it will deter Dalthus for at least a few moments, to do what he needs to do.

Sue is the closest, but Peter runs past her and Reed and Ben and the two others, straight to Tony. He knows Tony will be the best equipped to get them out of there. He’ll summon a suit. He’ll fight without thinking. He’ll step over Peter’s body without hesitation, because he has been in these situations too many times to waste even a second on the dead when there are actual lives at stake.

Dalthus is wheezing behind him. Close. Too close.

Peter shakes Tony’s shoulder. “Tony,” he says.

The man is grey-faced, but starts to scowl in his unconscious state. Peter shakes him again. “Tony, _get up_. You have to get — ”

Dalthus is laughing. Peter feels the panic hot in his throat. He knows what’s about to happen; Dalthus is going to materialize behind him, and this time, he’s going to rip off Peter’s mask. He’s going to freeze him the way he did back then, and take what he needs.

Peter’s out of time. He rips the pill out of his glove with his teeth, his tongue curling around it, poising it for destruction.  

“ _Mr. Stark_.”

Tony jolts awake with eyes so clear and so horrified that Peter might have blinked himself back to another time, another life when he really was someone else’s responsibility, when people actually were obligated to care. And maybe that’s the worst part — that he can see Tony still does. That he never stopped. That all this time, Peter has been lying to himself, using Tony’s indifference as some bitter crutch to keep himself moving when nothing else would.

Tony’s always been a step ahead of Peter, even when Peter is at full sprint. Which is why before Peter even bites down on the pill, Tony’s face is already starting to shift, starting to calculate and land on a conclusion even Peter hasn’t managed to fully accept.

“No,” Tony tells him. It is two-fold: he is forbidding Peter, and he is mourning him. He is reacting and he is accepting. He knows Peter just as well as he knows himself.

 _You’ve got too much Cap in you_ , Tony told him once, during one particularly self-sacrificial move in the middle of some fight. _We’ve gotta beat that out of you if you’re gonna live long enough to legally rent a car_.

But Peter never knew Captain America. He knew Iron Man. He knew the man behind the mask. He knew the fast and unflinching certainty in Tony’s bones, the uncompromised way he laid down his own life for others, that the only reason Tony was still alive was by no construct other than chance.

Peter’s chances are up now. He knows it. Tony knows it. The only one who doesn’t is Dalthus, who rips the mask off of Peter and wrenches his head to look at him. Peter feels his entire body go rigid, every bone and muscle numb, but he isn’t entirely certain what is to blame — Dalthus freezing him, or the pill that has spilled its contents down his throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this chapter was super mean and suuuuper late, but you have to be nice to me because I am EXTREMELY sleep-deprived and there is a mouse living in my apartment who refuses, despite me baiting him with DELICIOUS PEANUT BUTTER, to walk into any of my traps. (I have named him Archibald; we may not ever like each other, but over the past week of cohabitation, I'd ike to think there is at least a shared and begrudging mutual respect. MOVE TO NEW YORK, Y'ALL, EVERYTHING IS GREAT!!) 
> 
> Anyway, I'm dead inside but in a fun, feminist way, and I have NO IDEA when the next chapter is coming, but know that there is a plan and at one point when I don't have a soul-crushing deadline hanging over my head these updates will be much more regular!! In the meantime, bless all of you for keeping up with my extremely inconsistent sad bois, and I hope wherever you are it is at least semi-warm and not full of mice (unless that is something you're into, in which case, YOU DO YOU).


	11. Chapter 11

Peter is dying, and he isn’t.

He has nothing to compare it to except for the worst thing, the thing he has tried his hardest to forget: the state of existence beyond the snap. Only this time he doesn’t have the mercy of crumbling, of leaving his physical body behind. This time, after the contents of the pill slide down his throat and start to burn through him in all their destructive power, that destruction stops and never follows through — because Dalthus didn’t just freeze Peter. He froze everything. Muscles. Blood. Heart.

He’s trapped again in the _dead_ and the _not dead_ . The one thing he never fathomed on happening again. He’d wake up from nightmares from the snap, and the words he’d say to himself were always, _Get over it_ . They were never, _It won’t happen again_. Because that was a given. That was the only thing he was safe from. The idea that if death ever came for him, it may be ugly, and slow, and horrific, but it would at least be final.

_You really thought I would let you die?_

Peter can’t even cringe at Dalthus’s words in his head, taking up space where there isn’t any space left.

“Kid. Shit. _Shit_.”

It’s Tony — Peter can’t see him. Someone’s knocked the light emanating from his suit out of the way. He realizes a beat too late that it’s because Tony has pulled the mask off of him — because Tony is staring him directly in the face, one hand trying to stir his shoulder, the other on Peter’s cheek.

“You’re not … you’re gonna be okay, kid — _kid_ .” The hand on his shoulder is on his neck now, checking for a pulse. Peter knows he won’t find one. He wants to look over at Tony, to assure him that he’s still here — still here, even though he is in the kind of agony that makes him _wish_ he weren’t — but he isn’t even afforded that mercy. “No. No, no, no …”

Dalthus pries Peter out of Tony’s grasp, and Tony is too stunned to fight him until it’s too late. “You killed him,” says Tony, his voice guttural, unbearable in Peter’s ears. “Why would you bother keeping the rest of us alive if you were going to — ”

“He isn’t dead,” says Dalthus, his hands around Peter’s shoulders, his weapon crackling at Peter’s neck. Peter wishes he could lean into it, let it burn into his skin, let it pierce his throat and _finish_ this — every nerve in his body is screaming for a release that won’t come, screaming for air his lungs can’t fill — 

“Then what the fuck did you do to him?” Tony demands. “He’s not one of your _children_ , he’s — he’s just a kid, a regular kid, he doesn’t have anything you — ”

“On the contrary, he has exactly what I want. He has for years,” says Dalthus, his voice slippery.

“You’ve got the wrong punk. The wrong planet. There’s nothing here — ”

“His blood will bring back my brothers and sisters — the mortally wounded ones, who have been kept in stasis since the war,” says Dalthus. “His blood will bring back the old order, and make it new.”

Tony doesn’t have anything to say to that, and his silence confirms the truth of it. Something Peter himself never let himself imagine — Peter, who spent the whole first year after he got his abilities testing every boundary, pushing every limit. The dizzying heights he soared to, the blood he lost, the bones he crushed. It all seemed to have its own set point: he could go exactly this far, but no further.

He was only considering his own life, though. He never considered that these abilities of his — that whatever was in his blood — might have the ability to affect others beyond him.

That it might have the ability to bring on this kind of horror.

Even now, even with almost every ounce of his being consumed with the shrieking pain of the poison Dalthus won’t let flood through his veins, Peter cannot escape it: this sense he has had in his bones, since May and Ben took his hands and told him that his parents were gone. This second shadow that has followed him ever since, longer than his own will ever be, casting darkness wherever it goes.

He is no hero. He will never be one. The little good in he manages to do in this life will never outweigh the pain he leaves in his wake.

He should have gotten the hell out of this city while he had the chance. Should have left a long time ago, before May died, before Johnny crashed into his life. Should have left before he made the series of stupid decisions that led to this moment, when he has no decisions left to make.

Should have let himself die, all the times he almost did. Because there is no life now. Even if he lives through this, it’ll be its own death, one worse than a physical one — knowing he is responsible for more grief and terror than he’ll ever be able to fathom.

Tony opens his mouth then, and says the only thing that can make the situation worse: “I’ve got what he has. Undiluted. You can have it. I’ll take you right to it, if you just — ”

The room floods with light. No — fire. Dalthus hisses, the weapon grazing Peter’s neck, drawing blood but not nearly enough to kill him. Peter silently seethes, until he sees who’s at the other end of the blowtorch — Natasha.

Peter’s frozen gaze just happens to be tilted to the exact space she is filling. She looks like a dark angel in the shadow of her own flame, her eyes ignited, her mouth in a hard, unyielding line. She takes one calculated look at Peter, and it’s as if in that moment there is a pulse of understanding between them, louder than words, more immediate than a feeling.

The connection is so strong in that moment that Peter understands it is not just because of the past few months of knowing her, of navigating this new world through both of their eyes. That it’s something more innate, something older than he is — Natasha really did work with his mother. She understands him because she understood her. The ripple he has felt, the immediate trust he has had in her, even when he had no right — no _right_ to trust anyone, considering everything that was on the line — it was decided for him long before he was old enough to make decisions at all.

That trust has never been stronger than it is in this moment now, when he knows Natasha will do what he can’t.

“Tony. Get them out of here. As long as he’s freezing Peter he can’t freeze any of you.”

If Peter were capable of relief, it would cripple him.

Tony, of course, isn’t listening. He doesn’t even seem to notice the way Dalthus is incapacitated by the flames; that his hold on Peter is growing shakier by the moment.

“I’m not _leaving_ him — ”

“If you don’t, he’ll never forgive you. Get the hell up.”

Yes. _Yes_. Natasha will fix this, will be his voice when he is voiceless. Will follow through on Peter’s plan, which has now gone more wrong than he could ever imagine. She’ll make sure Tony saves the others, and they’ll band together, figure something out.

“ _Tony_.”

Peter disengages from them for a moment, trying to feel out Dalthus — hoping against hope that the connection between them will break, and the poison will set in, and he and his stupid blood will be taken out of the equation. He wonders why Natasha doesn’t just use the flames against Dalthus, and then he realizes: she isn’t nearly as calculating as she should be.

She’s being an idiot too. She’s trying to keep Peter alive.

“I offered their survival in exchange for his blood,” says Dalthus. “I have what I need. Get out now, and I will honor my pact.”  

“Get them the hell out of here,” says Natasha through her teeth.

“Don’t — _don’t_ , I — there’s a suit coming. We’ll fight. I’m not letting this happen, he’s not —  _expendable_. Jesus, Nat. Look at me.”

But all of her focus is on Peter, her eyes swimming in his vision like cold, brutal stars.

 _Kill me_ , he tries to tell her. _Kill me. Kill me, kill me, kill me_ — 

She can’t hear him, but she can. Peter knows she has understood every word. It doesn’t stop her from disregarding them.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” she tells him. “We’re not at zero yet.”

The memory slams into him sideways, somehow pierces through the pain: _What do you get when you multiply a number by zero?_ she’d asked him. And when he’d answered, she’d made her point —  _Same goes with ‘fast healing’ when you’re already dead._

At the time he thought she was telling him to stay safe. He didn’t realize it was her telling him that she was considering herself one of the people responsible for _keeping_ him safe. It feels like a betrayal of the highest order; it feels like his entire understanding of Natasha has been built on a lie.

Dalthus might be the one with the most honor among them. Either out of commitment to his word, or because he doesn’t want Natasha coming any closer with that fire, he lets them go.

Or rather, Natasha extinguishes the flame, and Dalthus uses the opportunity to phase out — this time with Peter in tow.

* * *

Peter is awake for all of it. For Dalthus phasing them several times over — he can’t materialize in and rematerialize in far distances, it seems. It takes them six or seven phases, or enough that Peter loses count, before he registers that they are aboard a ship. His mind is still sharp enough to determine that they must still be planetside, and must still be in Manhattan, given the limit of Dalthus’s traveling abilities. The rest of his body has been reduced to screams he can’t vocalize, to a hopelessness too deep in him to have a bottom —

And then he smells the smoke, and hears Dalthus’s screams.

Dalthus drops him, and Peter understands two things at the same time: one is that the ship is on fire. The other is that, weakened by the brightness of the licking flames, Dalthus has unfrozen him, and the poison is finally flowing through his veins.

“My _sisters_ ,” Dalthus shrieks. “My _brothers._ ”

The ship is full of containment chambers — full of alien warriors in the _stasis_ Dalthus was referring to — but now they are all burning, the glass cracked on their units, the liquid keeping them alive bursting in the flames. Dalthus doesn’t even seem to remember that Peter exists, scrambling from chamber to chamber, trying and failing to save them while screaming in agony at the brightness of the flames.

But Peter doesn’t feel the heat anymore. Doesn’t feel anything at all. Dying, it turns out, isn’t so bad when it’s allowed to happen properly. His eyes close first, and there’s some relief in that. In knowing that when someone finds him, either whole or charred from the flames, that he won’t be staring into nothing. Then the pain dissolves, so peripheral that he can’t remember what caused it, when or even how it began. The sounds of Dalthus screaming start to dim, the kind of distance that Peter understands isn’t physical, but far more pronounced — he’s leaving this behind. He’s getting what he wanted.

No — not what he wanted. There is this fleeting flicker of a thought, one that streaks through him like one last bolt of lightning in a dying storm — he never once wanted to die. He wanted to live. And that has always been the problem — this world has never made space for him to do it.

And then, suddenly, there is too much space at once. Too much air in his lungs. Too much blood in his veins. Too much skin on his body. The final hurdle, he realizes. A last trial of pain before he reaches the end.

Except the air settles, and the blood slows, and the skin cools, he opens his eyes not to the end of his life — but to the end of his life as he knew it.

She doesn’t deserve the word, but he doesn’t know what else to call her. “Mom?”

* * *

In some other world, this would make perfect sense. Peter is in the back of a minivan. His mom is driving, talking to someone on the phone. There’s traffic, or there must be, from the way she’s tapping her fingers on the steering wheel.

Except Peter’s laying in the back of the minivan motionless, as whatever antidote she injected in him courses its way through him. Except his mom is talking to someone who can only be the most feared and storied operative the world has ever known. Except she’s tapping her fingers on the steering wheel not just because of the traffic, but because she is exposed in the middle of the traffic, and is very much supposed to be dead.

She pulls the car over. Some of Peter’s senses are returning, oscillating in and out of their heightened forms. It’s just enough that he knows he’s they’re somewhere near Columbus Circle, somewhere near the Baxter Building. Somewhere she’s probably not supposed to be parking this car.

She turns around, facing him from the driver’s seat. He’s not even sure how he recognized her. Her hair is tied in a tight ponytail, her body sheathed in enough leather to rival Hawkeye, the lines around her face somehow making her sharper, not softer, than he ever remembered.

But the way her brow creases, the way eyes are wide with worry — he knows that expression. He’s seen it on her face a thousand times. Peter always was the kind of kid who made parents worry.

“Can you move?”

Peter hasn’t tried. It hasn’t occurred to him to try. There isn’t much room for anything other than _holy fuck my mom is alive and just set a bunch of comatose aliens on fire and dragged me out of a burning ship while injecting me with a serum that brought me back from the brink of death_.

But he can, and he does. He flexes his hand, then his wrist, and then his whole body jerks at once, like it was just waiting for him to come back to it.

She unbuckles her seatbelt, then hoists herself between the seats to join him in the back. Peter shrinks away from her involuntarily, backing himself into the passenger door. She doesn’t look surprised, or even hurt. Just resigned, like it was what she expected. Like it’s what she deserves.

She opens her mouth to say something, and Peter realizes in the beat just before she says it how naive he really still is — that even after everything he’s been through, he’s expecting things like explanations. Like apologies.

It makes it worse, when he’s blindsided. Knowing that he should know better by now.

“Here’s what you’re going to do, okay?”

He doesn’t answer her. Just stares. She pauses, staring back, overcome for a moment. It’s almost a relief — some proof that it really _is_ her, even when the proof is staring him in the face, even when the proof has his very same eyes and his very same way of phrasing things as questions when they don’t need to be.

She reaches out, like she’s going to take his hands, or touch his face. Peter doesn’t flinch, but she does — like there is some invisible wall between them. Like he threw one up. But Peter is too stunned to do anything of the kind.

“I’m going to drive you to an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen — ” She nods sharply, off his look, and before he can say anything she adds, “Yes, you’ve been there before.”

Yes. He has. When he woke from the first attempt someone made to kill him, the one that Natasha “took care of” but never explained.

She’s handing him clothes. Jeans. A hoodie. Listlessly, he pulls them on over his Ghost uniform, shoving his mask into a pocket as she continues to instruct him.

“You’re going to stay there and wait for Natasha. She’ll give you instructions on what to — ”

“No.”

His mother blinks at him. “No,” she repeats.

It occurs to Peter that she has probably never heard him say this to her before. That maybe, for her, the time that’s passed has seemed much shorter; what’s eight years when you’ve lived a full life? But to Peter, she’s half of a person, so distant in his memory that he can’t even remember their old patterns well enough to break them. He only realizes he has when he sees the surprise lift the features of her face.

“You’re going to take me to Port Authority. You’re going to give me enough money to get a bus out of Manhattan.” There’s no reason to hurt her, but suddenly, there is every reason: “And then you can go back to doing what you do best, and pretend I don’t exist.”

Her face betrays nothing. Her composure almost puts Natasha to shame. But Peter has spent his whole life wearing a mask, and he knows one when he sees it. He can still feel the full force of how much she loves him, of the pain he has caused her not just in this moment, but so many others. Somehow that understanding makes everything about this so much worse.

She doesn’t call him a coward. Doesn’t accuse him of running away. She knows exactly what his intentions are. Peter has an eerie sense then that maybe she has never been all that far — that she truly has been keeping tabs on him, haunting him like a ghost.

“We’re going to fix this,” she tells him, her voice low and urgent. She leans in, and in her intensity she forgets the wall between them, forgets that she’s made a stranger of herself. “The Accords. The formula. Dalthus. And when we do, we’re going to need you.”

Peter shakes his head. “Take me out of the equation, and there’s one less thing to fix.”

“And countless other people who will die.”

Peter just barely holds back a scoff. “You don’t need me for that,” he tells her. “Tony’s got your precious formula.”

“Forget the formula, Pete. I’m talking about _you_.”

He looks away from her sharply, the praise unexpected and undeserved. She hasn’t been here. She has no idea what he’s done, and who he’s hurt along the way. She has no idea of the price he has paid in the blood and the tears of people he loves.

“The others — Tony and Johnny’s team. Are they …”

“Safe in the tower,” she tells him. “On lockdown.”

They both know the word “lockdown” is a flimsy joke compared to what the outside world can do.

“You saved them. That’s what you’re meant to do. If you leave now …”

Peter pulls himself back. Stares out the window, out at the people passing by. He’s always had this tendency to stare, to linger too long on faces. To wonder who the person is, and what they do, and who they love. It used to be fun, the imagining. Now it only makes the weight of the responsibility on him even heavier, thinking of all of the life there is to lose.

She’s right. He can’t leave. With every person his eyes graze, that sense of unease he gets sometimes — the one that raises the hairs on his arms, pricks at the back of his neck — grows more and more pronounced. They’re all in danger.

He turns to her. “If I stay I’m not hiding.”

He’s expecting her to fight, but she’s interrupted; her eyes go upward, toward the speaker he knows she has in her ear. His abilities are back, so he hears every word.

“Change of plans: you’ve got to get him back to the tower,” says Natasha. “Stark doesn’t believe he’s alive and we’re not going to get anywhere until he has proof.”

“You’re en route to the ship?”

“What’s left of it.”

“And Dalthus — ”

“Still MIA.”

Peter interrupts them both. “He’s still _out there?_ ”

His mom’s eyes snap over to his. “I wasn’t going to let you die.”

“This seems like a _deeply_ inconvenient moment to start caring about my mortality — ”

“And this seems like a deeply inconvenient moment for this conversation,” Natasha cuts in. “Words later. We need the kid, and we need his help.”

Peter’s hand is already on the door.

Natasha knows he can hear her, so she continues: “Secret identities are off the table. This is gonna be bigger than anything Ross or the rest of the world can throw at us.”   

Peter doesn’t even have the wherewithal to process what she means by that, too focused on the hard edge of Natasha’s words. She’s not one to oversell a problem, or to command someone to do something without coming at it from all sides. If she thinks it’s worth risking it to pull him into the fray, whatever’s coming is — 

“Peter,” says his mom, grabbing his elbow. Only then does he realize he’s halfway out of the car. He turns back to her, to the hand around his arm, following it up to the worry etched on her face.

 _Be careful_ , she was going to say. Or maybe even _I’m sorry_. Whatever it is, it plays out like a shadow across her face, but doesn’t make it to her eyes.

Peter touches her hand, gently squeezing it before taking it off his arm. He’s not sure if he’ll ever see her again. He knows all too well going into this kind of thing that you can’t count on any one person surviving.

Still, when he speaks again, he surprises even himself.

“Is my dad … ?”

She reaches forward then, and does what she hesitated to do before. She touches his face, her hand stupidly familiar on his cheek, the ache of it rising up so fast that he’s afraid to blink — afraid that if he lets himself close his eyes, even for a moment, he’ll let himself sink back into the boy he was, and forget what he is now. She holds him there for a moment, her eyes searching his, as if she can try to absorb the years she has missed, as if she can find everything they’ve lost.

“I wish you weren’t so much like him,” she says, which is to say: _no_.

* * *

Only after Peter reaches the tower does he understand what Natasha means by secret identities being “off the table.” He can’t get in the way he normally can in his street clothes. Even if he could flash his ID at someone, the doors are all locked, and surrounded with security to boot.

His hand skims the zipper of his hoodie. If he goes in, he has to go in as Ghost. And if he does that …

Tony will expose him in an instant. He knows it in a way he couldn’t have appreciated, even hours ago — knows it from the way Tony fought for him, the way he’s still fighting for him. He’s not going to let Peter get away with hiding anymore. Not after everything they’ve put each other through, and not considering what’s at stake.

Peter steels himself, working his way around the block to find a corner to slip off the hoodie and jeans. He wonders if Johnny will ever forgive him. He supposes it doesn’t matter now. Johnny’s already angry with him — angry with Andrew, that is — and even if he weren’t, he should have given up hope over Johnny weeks ago. This ache he’s feeling right now is the kind he can’t blame anyone for but himself.

“Dude, you can’t just _leave_.”

Peter’s ears perk, only because he recognizes the voice — it’s a full block away, at the base of the tower, but unmistakably belongs to Dorie.

“Like hell I can’t.”

It’s embarrassing, what the sound of Johnny’s voice does to him; how all of the resolve he just came to seems to slip out from under him in an instant, so flimsy he wonders how he ever thought there was anything it could hold.

“I’ve got to find him — ”

“I’m sure Andy’s fine,” says Dorie. “He’s a spy kid or whatever, right?”

Peter freezes, realizing why Johnny’s words are coming too fast, too on edge.

“You heard what they were saying. Something happened to Ghost. Something _bad_. And right before that I sent Andy out to — ”

“Why don’t you just call him?”

Johnny’s voice is pained. “He doesn’t have a phone. I was supposed to … _fuck_. This is all my fault.”

Peter zips the hoodie back up and moves, heading toward them. The longer Johnny is out looking for him, the longer he and Dorie are both exposed — and if Dalthus really is out there, if something really is about to go down, they can’t afford any kind of visibility right now.

“If something happened to him — shit. I don’t even know where to — ”

“Andy?”

It’s Dorie who spots him first. Peter waves from across the street, and starts to run over to them, trying to look casual about it — except there’s nothing casual about the way he stumbles, his limbs not quite fully in his command. Johnny’s sprinting over to him in a heartbeat, so fast that a car squeals its brakes and honks at him, so fast that Peter doesn’t even have a moment to prepare himself for the wrecked look on Johnny’s face, for the panic in his eyes.

“Andy. What _happened?_ Are you — you look — ”

“I — ”

Before Peter can work himself into another hole by lying, Johnny’s arms are around him, in an embrace so bone-crushing that it takes Peter a moment to register that Johnny’s shaking all over his body.

“Fuck. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t even thinking — ”

“Johnny, you don’t have to be — ”

“ — sending you out like that, in the middle of _this_ , when anything could have — ”

“It’s fine, I’m fine, really — ”

“You’re not,” says Johnny, finally pulling away from him. He braces his hands on Peter’s shoulders, staring at him long and hard, accounting for him. Peter wishes the same way he always does that Johnny would look at him and see him the way he sees Johnny; instead all he sees in Johnny’s eyes are red-rimmed, throbbing guilt. “Fuck. You’re not. What happened to you?”

Peter can’t tell if the sudden weakness he feels is from the aftereffects of the poison, or the intensity of those blue eyes on him.

“Nothing some coffee won’t fix,” he says.

Johnny shakes his head. “Andy …”

Peter reaches out, his hand on Johnny’s elbow. “Don’t we need to be inside?”

Dorie’s gone silent next to them, gone completely still. If Peter weren’t so distracted then maybe he would have seen what was coming just before it did. Maybe he would have even been able to stop it.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Johnny, the quiver now in his voice, the relief making him look younger than he ever has. “Andy, I’m so …”

“I’m the one who’s sorry. I lied to you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure almost got you killed,” says Johnny, laughing weakly, “so we’re more than even.”

“I’m fine, Johnny, really.”

Johnny blows out a breath, like he’s been holding one for the last hour, like he still can’t quite believe it. “If something happened to you, I’d …”  

“Find another perfectly nice dweeb to help with your homework.”

He says it to make Johnny laugh again, to make Johnny give into Peter’s pull, trying to direct him back to the tower. But Johnny’s face cracks open, his eyes watering.

“Andy — my life is so fucked up. Everything around it is fucked up. And I’m scared that — that something like this might happen again, that you might …” He shakes his head, like he can’t quite believe he’s going to say whatever he’s about to say next. “So I just — I need to say something. And you don’t have to say anything back, but I — I need you to know.”

Peter has forgotten he’s supposed to lead Johnny inside. Has forgotten everything that isn’t the way Johnny’s looking at him right now, the way he can hear Johnny’s heart thrumming, can feel it in the palms he’s still resting on Peter’s shoulders.

“The truth is …”

Then something shifts, and something _screams_ — no. Something’s been screaming. That whine in the back of Peter’s brain, that sense for danger. It’s like he’s been muffling it all this time, and it’s only broken through, so loud and so persistent that it _hurts_. Peter stumbles back from Johnny, and it’s too easy — Johnny lets him go.

“Johnny, we’ve got to — Johnny?”

Johnny’s arms are at his sides like a rag doll, his eyes blank. No. _No_. This can’t be happening.

“Johnny,” he tries. He reaches out and shakes him. “ _Johnny._ ”

Only then do Johnny’s eyes snap on his, but it’s not Johnny anymore. His gaze is cloudy, his face slack. He reaches out, and Peter — naive, hopeful, _stupid_ Peter — thinks for a moment that he’s gotten through.

Then Johnny abruptly reaches forward, wraps a hand around Peter’s neck, and shoves him into a concrete wall.

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all ...................... Y'ALL. everything is happening so much. come july, when review season is over at work and i get my Big Draft turned in, and a bunch of other things in my life calm down that i'd write about here if they didn't seriously incriminate me because they are so oddly specific that you could google my actual human self in an instant, i will have more time for these boys. thank you as always for your patience. it means the world to me, and also to the 10,000 tiny beetles breaking in through my window, crawling all over me in my sleep, and leaving their corpses in my sheets once they finally inhale enough of the poison i have sprayed all over the apartment and am also breathing in on the reg. 
> 
> NEW YORK IS GREAT GUYS EVERYONE MOVE HERE!!! 
> 
> truly though, it means the goddamn world to me that you guys are still waiting me out on these chapters. i really didn't think going into this that a lot of people would be on board with me trying out a new ship and i am DELIGHTED to discover that everyone is as here for Extremely Cocky Puppy Dog Johnny Storm as i am. prayers up that the "multiverse" in spider-man means we get to see johnny soon ........... ;)

**Author's Note:**

> Friends. I met my deadlines. I did my things. And now I have MORE deadlines and MORE things. And so I am coping in an extremely emotionally responsible way by writing fan fic instead. 
> 
> I know this isn't my usual fare, but I hope y'all give it a chance. Lots of angst and Iron Dad ahead, but also lots of fluff and trope-it-y tropes. And likely lots of author's notes wherein I tailspin into adorable existential crises about the morbid state of my real life writing career, but HEY, that's what your twenties are all about, amirite???
> 
> (Also, to be clear, I love Johnny Storm. But Peter's gotta hate him for now because I have PLANS, y'all.)


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